Procrastination.  This is a word we are all familiar with.  Either we ourselves are procrastinators or some of us are always reminded by teachers, parents, etc. not to procrastinate.  Everybody does it, some worse than others.  Why is it however, that some do it worse than others?  There was always that kid in high school that would stay up until 5 o clock in the morning to do a paper.  However there was also the kid that started working on the paper as soon as it was assigned and would meet with the teacher before it was due to get feedback.  Why are some of us worse procrastinators than others?

There are a lot of sites that try to explain why we procrastinate, but there is an interesting study  that was done earlier this year at DePaul University that does a pretty good job at telling us why some of us are worse at procrastinating than others.  The study actually has two parts to it.  The first part consisted of 59 participants (19m, 40f). They were first given a self-psychological evaluation test to gauge their self-reported procrastination levels, the evaluation also included other things in order to keep the participants from knowing that procrastination was being evaluated.  Then they were told that they were about to take a cognitive test that did not require math skills above grade 8, but the test would gauge how well they will do in the real world later in life.  So the students were not aware the test was a phony and that they were actually being tested on procrastination.  They were given 15 minutes to prepare for this test.  They were told 15 minutes was the proper amount of time to prepare, but they could choose to do other activities which were, playing Tetris or working on a difficult puzzle.  The experimenter then left the room and observed each of the participants without their knowledge.  The participants were recorded by whether they actually practiced math problems or did other things such as play Tetris, work on the puzzle, or just played with their hair.  Then the experimenter returned after 15 minutes and administered the ‘test.’  After the test, the participants were told what was really going on.  The results concluded that the participants’ self-reported procrastination correlated with their actual observed procrastination in the experiment.  It also found that there was almost no difference between procrastination rates between the males and females.

The second part of the study actually has two parts in itself.  It consisted of 88 participants (40m, 48f).  The group was divided into two sections.  The first section was the same exact experiment as the first part mentioned above, but the second group was different.  Instead of telling the second group that the test being given was really important and would gauge future success in the real world, they were told that the test was designed to be fun and that their success on the test had no correlation with their abilities.  The findings with the first group were consistent with the first part of the study, the self-reported procrastination correlated to the actual procrastination observed, and there was no difference between men and women.  The second group however gave some different results.  There was NO correlation between self-reported procrastination and actual observed procrastination.

Some general conclusions can be made from this study.  People who self-report procrastination are more likely to actually do it for an important task.  However, the second part of the study shows us that self-reported procrastinators do not actually procrastinate when they are given a task that is said to be ‘fun.’  So we see that procrastination might be some sort of self-handicap that we use when we face a threatening task.  The study could have been better, though.  If they took note of at which part people practiced the problems, maybe some people practiced the problems at the beginning and played Tetris towards the end to clear their mind.  I wouldn’t consider that procrastination.  Instead the experimenter just added up the times spent doing each thing and not taking note when it was done.  This could be a form of the Texas Sharpshooter problem.  It is possible that they skewed the way they observed the participants so it would show that they procrastinated more than they actually did.  They did not take into account maybe other ways the participants could have been preparing for the test besides doing practice problems, perhaps meditation or praying.

So all in all this study shows us that maybe some of us would procrastinate less if we thought of our work as more fun than as important and dreadful.  So it is possible that those who do not procrastinate are able to turn their tasks into games and change their perception of the task from dreadful to fun.  However this experiment does not really give us enough proof to make a concrete conclusion because it could have been done better. I think it is safe to say that procrastination is worse when something seems dreadful and the procrastinator is not able to perceive their task as something not so bad.  I for one can attest to this.  I don’t mind doing math homework and find it interesting.  If I get problems wrong I am curious as to why and I guess I do actually make it into a kind of game.  So when it comes to taking a test I am prepared from all my homework.  On the converse however I did not like studying for my ethics class in high school.  It was very confusing and the topics we talked about were very daunting.  The whole class was dreadful and grim, so I procrastinated doing the homework and studying for quizzes.  So altogether the study makes sense, but as we learned before in class, OUR INTUITION IS LOUSY.

I sit so much during the day.  Sit down for class, sit down to do homework, sit down to eat, sit down to watch TV, etc.  I was wondering if all this sitting has some sort of effect on my health.  I found an interesting article about the health effects of sitting too much.  It says that sitting too much can increase your risk of death by 50% and increases risk of cardiovascular related problems by 125%.  This article claims that even if you sit about the same amount of time, but go to the gym and exercise more, it will to make much of a difference.  The main way to avoid these health concerns is just standing up and walking around if you get the opportunity to if you have been sitting down for a long period of time.  Another website with an article based off studies that show sitting too much really is bad for you and says that every half hour or so you should get up and maybe make a walking lap around the office.  Maybe this could work for a a college student in class if you just got up and walked to the bathroom.  The article also points out that there are limitations to the studies on this topic because they are all observational and do not account for lifestyle differences such as smoking, drinking, etc.  According to an article in WebMD, scientists can not pinpoint the reason why sitting too much is so bad for you.  They do have a guess however:  blood flow is slower when we are sedentary which increases risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and other bad things.

Studying while listening to music has become a common thing within the last 10 years due to the popularity of iPods, mp3 players, and other medias of music.  I’ve always wondered though, is the music helping us at all or is it just hindering us?  When I was looking up studies for this I was listening to Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones, but when I found this interesting study, I turned off my music.

The study was conducted with 25 participants who were students at a university in England between ages 18 and 30.  There was five sound environments being tested in this experiment.  Silence, changing-state speech, steady-state speech, liked music, and disliked music.  The silence is self explanatory.  The changing state-speech is a random set of numbers being played into the earphones of the participants.  This random number oration is supposed to simulate somebody talking near or around you.  The steady-state speech part is the participant hearing the word ‘three’ over and over again for the entire duration.  This is supposed to simulate a constant noise like an air condition or constant traffic going by if you were near a highway.  The liked music was not a constant.  Each participant got to choose their own song that was long enough to be played for the duration of the trial.  The dislike music was actually a constant however.  Before the trial began, each volunteer was asked, among other things, whether or not they like the song “Thrashers” by Death Angel, each person that said they did like it was disqualified.  So every participant did not like the song.  Each noise segment had 5 lists of 8 consonant letters in random order.  The participants were shown each list and then were asked to recall the order in which the letters in the list were presented.  This was repeated four more times for each noise segment.  The participants then rated each noise segment on a scale of pleasurableness.

The results of the trial were somewhat surprising.  Quietness showed the best recall performance with a close second to steady-state speech.  The like music, disliked music, and changing-state speech segment all showed about the same level of impairment.  This experiment could have gone many other different ways to give us a better answer.  They could have experimented with instrumental music like Mozart or something like that.  They could have tried to see if volume made a difference by having some participants listen to louder or quite versions of the noise segments.  They could have tried having the participants just listen to music while they are first being shown the lists to memorize, then shut off the music when it is time to recall the lists.  That is more realistic because students are not allowed to listen to music during a test.  They could have broken it up into more age groups if they had more people to see if younger people actually do study better than older people with music.  This could have skewed the data some because the age of the participants ranges from 18 to 30.  There is a big difference between the mind of an 18 year old and the mind of a 30 year old.

All in all the experiment could have been done a lot better.  It is more of an anecdote because there is only 25 people in the survey versus the millions of people that study at college.  The study could suffer from the Texas Sharpshooter problem in order to avoid being a part of the File Drawer problem.  If the study finds something contrary to what people might assume like listening to music you like actually doesn’t help with studying, then it will not be ignored.  So this study is unreliable to make any concrete conclusions.  I did find however that I am able to concentrate better when I am not listening to music.  Before studying though, it does help me to get in a good mood before I start, but I focus better without any noise.

Third hand smoking.  That is right, not first, not second, but third hand smoking.  This is the residue that builds up on surfaces around a smoker.  Surfaces such as according to an article,“hair, skin, clothes, furniture, drapes, walls, bedding, carpets, dust, vehicles, and other surfaces.”  The only way to avoid thirdhand smoke is to create an environment completely absent of smoke.Thirdhand smoke could be affecting children in ways we are not aware because it is a fairly new concept.  So it is good to be mindful, if you smoke, of where you smoke and who is interacting with the area.

Everytime I see or hear someone yawn, I feel the urge to yawn and sometimes I do end up yawning.  Even just reading the word yawn multiple times makes me want to yawn.  Just typing this makes me want to yawn.

Contagious yawning happens even when we are not tired according to an experiment done on 120 healthy kids from ages 1 to 12.  The children were not aware that their yawns were being watched and as a person read a book to them, the person would yawn and then each kid who yawned would be counted as a contagious yawn.  The study found that contagious yawning is not apparent amongst kids ages 1 through 3, but there was a hike in contagious yawning in kids starting at age 4 and up.  This is a peculiar finding.  The study mentioned before also did another part where they tested contagious yawning on 26 kids from ages 6 to 15 who had autism which ranged on different parts of the spectrum.  Since there were less kids in this study, they were not able to make a conclusion based on age, but the study did find that kids with mild autism yawned 1/2 the amount the healthy kids did, and the kids with more severe autism did not yawn at all.  The study found a correlation between contagious yawning and empathy.  This makes sense because the Theory of Mind does not develop in healthy kids until about age 4.  Which means kids younger than 4 do not understand that others have different thoughts than their own and therefore can not empathize another’s yawn with their own.  This also makes sense because children with autism also struggle with the development of the Theory of Mind.  However the study did not take into account a confounding variable that maybe the kids were yawning because they were tired or anxious.  So this study could possibly suffer from the Texas Sharpshooter Problem and be a false positive.

Another study was conducted using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).  An fMRI shows brain activity vs a regular MRI which only just gives images of the structure of the brain.  This experiment was also done a small group of people (18, 9 m, 9 f), but it used healthy adults ages 18-48 years old.  The subjects did not specifically know that their yawns were being monitored, but they did know they were participating in an experiment on facial expressions.  The subjects were shown pictures of people with different facial expressions.  When they were shown a picture of a person that was yawning and then felt the urge to yawn or actually yawned, it was counted as a contagious yawn.  The study found that the part of the brain used for empathy is the same part activated when the subjects saw another person yawning and felt the urge to, or actually yawn.  They connected the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the urge to yawn.  The ventromedial prefrontal cortex had been previously connected to “empathetic processing.”  This study coincides with the findings of the other study.  Also, the same as the other study did not take into account confounding variables like that maybe the subjects were just getting tired of looking at pictures and just yawned out of boredom.  Also the brain has different parts that do many different functions, so maybe yawning is a function that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex does completely separate of empathy.  I think this study is conducted about as well as possible considering we can not control people’s other reasons for yawning.

Collectively we are not able to exactly pinpoint what causes contagious yawning.  Maybe if the first study was repeated with the exact same layout except another set of kids.  If they used 240 kids, but still separated each kid by age having 20 kids per age group.  Then each age group would be broken up into 2 sets of 10.  This way if maybe the kids in one room are just actually bored by the reader maybe the other set of kids will give us truer results.  It would be best to have as many sets of kids as possible obviously.  There does seem to be a correlation between empathetic thinking and contagious yawning, but the studies are not strong enough yet to know for sure.

Napping is an everyday phenomenon for most college students.  Some might even take multiple naps in the day.  I definitely am one of these people, sometimes I feel better after a nap and sometimes I feel worse.  I’ve always wondered is my napping good for me or bad for me?

According to Markham Heid’s article in Time Magazine’s website, for certain people, naps are good, while for others naps are unnecessary because of genetics.  For those people that need naps, they serve to be extremely beneficial to their work performance.  I find this very true.  In my own life, my dad never naps and is able to work all day and still have energy for the rest of the evening and into the night.  However, my mom and I usually need a little nap after a long day to keep ourselves going, even though I may sleep a little more than my mom.  That clearly shows that I must have my mom’s genetic inclination to need more sleep.

This begs the question that for those who need naps, how long should they be?  The Mayo Clinic has a nice article on napping in general, but they do give an answer that is agreed upon across the board.  Naps should be kept short, 10 minutes to 30 minutes tops.  If you nap for too long, a thing called sleep inertia will affect you.  Sleep inertia is the technical term for the phenomenon when you feel worse than you did before you took the nap.

There was an interesting study conducted by some British guys in 2008 that proves naps are good.  It even concludes that naps are even more effective than getting more sleep at night.  Also, it shows that if you try to do something to keep yourself awake when you feel sleepy during the day, like drink coffee, it is more beneficial to just take a quick nap instead.

In conclusion, it is still necessary to get a good night’s sleep, however if you feel a little sleepy in the afternoon, you should lie down for a short period of time to knock the edge off.

I am doing this course because I have always appreciated how important science is but I never really cared to understand all the stuff that any field of science entails.  I did not like science in high school so I pretty much decided that I would not pursue any science major.

A picture of the dogpile after the Phillies won the World Series in 08.

Here is a link to Harry Kalas calling he last out.