When I started meeting people at the beginning of this college year, nervous thoughts were constantly racing through my head: How did other people view me? Did they understand my humor, my values? As a professional over thinker, I am constantly wondering how people look at me. What do they like and why do they like it? What do they find annoying? Along with that am (often) eager to learn how people view other people. Once again overthinking the situation, I do not think this curiosity is derived from only insecurities, but also from curiosity about what goes through people’s minds. I find perspective one of the most confusing yet intriguing things in the world.

I asked the question: Do you think people see you the way you see yourself? These are some of the responses I received:

• no I think we see ourselves differently cuz we see more imperfections with ourselves. we judge ourselves harsher
• no- I think people think I am a lot uglier than I think I am. But who knows.
• I hope people hopefully see me as a variation as the way I see myself. That being said its understandable that people will likely have varying opinions
• no- I see myself as an emotional worrywart trainwreck and pull off confident and give no f**** attitude to some people
• I think people see me somewhat different from the way I see myself I think people see me as a lot more confident then I really know everyone sees me the way I am in the sense of my happiness and my attitude
• yes-Well I think the way I present myself to other people is pretty representative of who I am as a person like I’ll never act a different way depending on who I’m around
• Obviously not- everyone puts on a persona no matter who you are, everyone is scared of rejection and not being accepted so everyone wants to be there best self
• I think that as much as one thinks he or she can, you can never really see your true flaws or excelling qualities. And everything you think about yourself you expect to be amplified in other people’s perceptions
• I don’t think so. I think people see me better than I see myself

I asked this question to 103 people. 23% of the overall study said yes, leaving 77% saying no. The ratio of females to males, however was uneven, so I re-examined the results based on gender. 13/62 females believe people see them the way they see themselves, and 11/41 males believe people see them the way they see themselves. That is only 21% of females, and 27% of males. I separated the results by gender because I hypothesized that more males would respond “yes”. Though they were slightly greater, the response was not as high as I predicted. To me this shows that men and women’s perspectives are not as different as most think.

To be completely honest, I am not sure what 77% of people saying they do not think most people see them and they see themselves shows. Does this just stem from insecurities? Does this show that people are too timid to show others their vulnerability. Or for people that know they are the hardest on themselves, do they know their perspectives are distorted?
After looking at these results further, I wondered: Ok, so for the people that said no, which perspective should they believe in more, their own or the people around them? If we are harder on ourselves should we listen to the people telling us we are better? Or if we think the people around us think less of us, should we try to see understand what they are saying? What perspective is the most “true”; or does this define what a perspective is not?

Animal testing is an “archaic” technique that has been used millions of times to improve science, but is it just? With trial an error, more innocent animals have died than there have been successes, but what if those tests were done on humans… they would have all died too. Scientist as well as the general population typically have a very black or white perspective towards animal testing, but is it that simple?

Through vast examples in class, we have seen how the use of rats and dogs have furthered science. Oscar Auerbach trained beagles to smoke starting in 1967. While he induced the beagles with lung cancer, he was the first scientist to prove that smoking cigarettes has a direct causation to getting lung cancer. Source Watch The basic elimination of polio in the United States and Europe is due to Dr. John Enders and colleagues injecting monkeys, mice, and rats with polio, and later by Albert Sabin. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Sabin stated “approximately 9,000 monkeys, 150 chimpanzees and 133 human volunteers have been used thus far in the quantitative studies of various characteristics of different strains of polio virus. These studies were necessary to solve many problems before an oral polio vaccine could become a reality.” (Animal Research). Though thousands of animals were used, billions of lives were saved.

On the contrary, many people feel as if too many animal lives are being waisted in these experiments, and the treatment of the animals is too cruel to allow for it to continue. “According to Humane Society International, animals used in experiments are commonly subjected to force feeding, forced inhalation, food and water deprivation, prolonged periods of physical restraint, the infliction of burns and other wounds to study the healing process, the infliction of pain to study its effects and remedies, and ‘killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means.’” One example of this obscene torture is the Drazie eye test This test is used to see if chemicals will irritate eyes. Rabbits eyelids are held open for long periods of time, and the chemical are put into the animals eyes. The rabbits are then killed after the experiment is concluded. Peta. Many opponents of animal testing argue that we are technologically and scientifically advanced enough to use other methods for experimentation.

I understand both sides of the argument. While I am without a doubt not in support of animal cruelty, it has been proven in the past that animals have tremendously improved science. I think this is such a prevalent issue in science because animal testing is a ginormous part of the successes and failures within the field. I thought after researching both sides of the argument, I would have a clear understanding of where I stand. Hahaha boy was I wrong.

Though I am not a scientist, I am trying to understand this argument from there point of view. I think scientist don’t view this as a mortality argument but rather a realistic mechanism to improving the future. That is why this has been a lingering feud and it has been hard to compromise the use of animal testing. Though there is not a definite answer whether animal testing should continue to be used in the science world, that is why it fits in so perfectly to the science world. Science stimulates criticism, opinion, and judgement.

For most people, music acts as a stable mechanism that they countlessly turn to. Despite the emotion, there is always a song to coincide. At a party, all that is needed is an anthemic melody, blithe lyrics, and a driving beat to make the night an incredible memory. On a road trip, it only takes one Jack Johnson song and a window seat to become tranquil. Does music have magical powers?

Think about the last time you were REALLY sad. What did you do? When I asked my friends this question, 7/10 of them said the same thing; “I sat on my bed and listened to sad music”. The instantaneous reaction seems like it should make sense; listen to the type of song that matches your emotional status… but why would we want to amplify our sorrows by downing ourselves in depressing music. Shouldn’t we listen to happier music to make us feel better? Or do people not want to feel better nor help themselves when they are sad? I guess the odd connection between people’s sadness and their music selection caught more than just my attention, as a case study was published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal this summer.
44 diverse participants each listened to three, 30 second songs, all of which were transposed into minor keys to induce “sadness”. After they were asked how they felt, and how they thought other people would feel while listening to this song. After the songs were transposed into their major keys, and the participants listened again. Again they were asked those same two questions. A felt emotion is how t
hey themselves felt, and a perceived emotion is how they thought others would feel. This study concluded that the felt emotions differed from the perceived emotion. The response from the felt emotion varied from “romantic, fascinated, and dear and in love”, while the response from the perceived emotion varied from “tragic, gloomy, and miserable”. Similarly in the major key, “perceived blithe emotions were rated higher than their felt counterparts.” NY Times. This case is arguing that sad music intact generates positive emotions within people. So how is this possible?
Psychologist Ai Kawakami, who ran this experiment, defines this emotional response as “vicarious emotions. we experience secondhand sadness that somehow transforms into something lovely and positive.” (Huffington Post
). Today there is not much information on vicarious emotions, so it is hard to understand how our second set of emotions react.

Though Kawakami’s observations do give a viable reason to why people turn to sad music when they are sad, I hypothesized a different theory. When my parents dropped me off to college, I was a wreck. I didn’t stop crying, and of corse I had “The Scientist”, “Yellow” and “Desperado” on repeat. Though looking back, listening to those songs didn’t make me feel romantic or fascinated. Instead the harrowing lyrics and provoking music provided me with the comfort that I wasn’t alone in my emotions. When I would hear my neighbor’s up beat pop music blasting from next door, it only made me feel that much more sad and alone. From experience alone, I think people find comfort in listening to sad music because it makes them feel like they are not alone.

When you got up this morning, how did you want the world to see you? Did you want to be taken seriously or did you want people to know you were tired. What would you think if Andrew came to class in baggy sweat pants and a sweatshirt? How much would you think he valued his job? Fashion is important. I’m not talking about collecting designer items or spending thousands of dollars on a single accessory, but the way you dress is important.

In the Does Prayer Heal lesson, we learned that though prayer doesn’t heel, though it does helps shorten the duration of a patients visit. This is because the patients believed in themselves and wanted to get better. Fashion has that power. It has the ability to make someone feel so confident and in control of themselves that it them to mentally be the best version of themselves. Through a study run by researchers at Columbia University and California State University, Northridge, it was discovered that formal clothing improves people’s cognitive thinking. The The study  published in Social Psychological & Personality Science asked college students to dress in clothing they would normally wear to class or business formal clothing. They then took a cognitive thinking test. “Across a series of experiments, those wearing the more formal outfits exhibited broader, more holistic thinking.” (The Huffington Post). This could seem absolutely crazy to some. How could your clothing change the way your mind works? A co-author of the article, Michael Slepian, described how “Formal clothing made people feel more powerful, which in turn made them more likely to adopt high-level, abstract thinking,” while they also also “…improve your mood if you feel good in the clothing and think it looks good.”

Another sStudy conducted by professors at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University continues this theory that ones outfit effects their cognitive thinking. The study gave two groups of participants different white coats. One group was given white doctor’s coats to wear, while the other was given white artists’ coats. They were both then asked to perform a cognitive test called a strobe test. A flash card had a word written in a color, and par
icipants had to say the color of the word rather than the word itself. The participants in the lab coats had better results than those in the artist coats. Galinsky, one of the researchers, concluded from this study that  “their findings show that it’s not just the experience of wearing the clothes, but the symbolic meaning they hold for the people”. Basically, putting on an outfit that society claims to be “cute” will not instantaneously make you feel better. You have to wear clothing that makes YOU feel good and empowered. In this example, the lab coats made the participants feel smarter. I remember the episode of Greys Anatomy when Meredith received her doctors coat and it made her feel like a “real” doctor.

So what does this mean for us as students? College students are notorious for showing up to class in the most comfortable clothes they own, aka pajamas. Yet it has been proven through these two studies that dressing “up” will make you perform better mentally. So try it next time you have class. Put on an outfit that makes you feel great about yourself and see how you perform that day academically!

My grandmother still can’t fathom the fact that people have such strict dietary needs now in days. When she was a kid food allergies were nonexistent. Fast forward a decade, when my dad was a kid “peanut allergies” were were not a thing. Now think about when you were in elementary school; there was at least a handful of students in just your class alone with a peanut allergy. I’m sure even a good portion of you reading this have dietary restrictions such as gluten, dairy, or shellfish. In 1997, .4% of children in the United States had a food allergies. In 2010, that number increased by 1 whole percent! Just five years later, that number is most likely even higher! So why has the the quantity of allergens dramatically increased over the years?

Doctors have noticed that not only the amount of allergens have increased, but so has the amount of children diagnosed with allergies. CNN Though hypotheses have been theorized and a large amount of experiments have been conducted, there is still no definitive answer why allergies have grown.

Early theories suggested that exposing infants to peanut products at an early age would “sensitize” them and result in a fatal peanut allergy (pediatrics), so mothers would avoid eating peanuts during pregnancy, and withhold peanut exposure to their kids until the age of three so their body was further developed. This theory was proven as a false positive in 2008 due to the lack of change in the quantity of people with peanut allergies. (NY Times)

A more up to date hypothesis support the opposite hypothesis of the previous one. It argues that early exposure will in fact decrease a child’s probability of developing
a peanut allergy. “In a recent study of 8,205 children, 140 of whom had allergies to nuts,
researchers found that children whose nonallergic mothers had the highest consumption of peanuts or tree nuts, or both, during pregnancy had the lowest risk of developing a nut allergy. The risk was most reduced among the children of mothers who ate nuts five or more times a month.” (archpedi)

Though there have been trials that show a correlation between early exposure and a decrease in the amount of peanut allergies, there is no way to prove that this correlation is causation for a decrease in nut allergies. First of all, there is no way of the scientist kno
wing if the child was predisposed to having the allergy. So it would not matter how many peanuts the mother ate while pregnant, the infant could have never had a predisposition of the al
lergy. Though this hypothesis seems logical, it is impossible to prove true.

If I were to run a trial, attempting to understand the growth in allergies, I would construct a randomized control trial. The trial would consist of 100 babies between the ages of 1-3, 100 teenagers between the ages 15-18, all with peanut allergies. I would then als
o test a third age groups of children 1-3 without peanut allergies. Once a week, each child would visit a hospital and would get injected with a peanut protein. Every week, they would be injected with more protein than the last week. Their reactions would be recorded and this trial would run for 1 year. After the year, I would examine the differences between the 1-3 year old allergies group, and the 15-18 allergy group. Within those two groups, I would see if the immunization had any effect. I would also see if the age difference had any effect, due to the fact that a child between the ages of 1 and 3 still have a developing body while a teen is much more
further developed. This will prove if immunization and exposure actually do have an effect on the prevention of allergies, and it will also show if early exposure makes a difference. The children ages 1-3 without the peanut allergies are also in the experiment as a precaution to see if any of them could develop an allergy within the trial. The non-allergic group can often be overlooked or viewed as unimportant, but it is a vital part. My best friend use to eat p
anuts without a problem, yet in 2014 at the age of 16, she developed an allergy to nuts. Could this trial have prevented that?

My trial was based off the immunotherapy trial conducted in Cambridge. The difference between them though is I think it is important to test different age groups, as well as kids without an allergy already. The Cambridge trial only tested kids 7-16. But we want to see if early immunization has a greater effect. Also, the Cambridge trial lasted for 6
months, and used 39 participants. Cambridge Trial My trial will be tested for a longer duration of time, and using more participants in order to receive more results.

You’re probably just as surprised from the title of my article as I was when I read the title of articles online about this topic. It turns out, this is just a way to draw you in. Wine won’t make you lose weight, sorry for the letdown. In fact, too much wine will actually make you gain weight. However it does burn the fat in your liver, or at least according to Neil Shay. Shay, a biochemist and molecular biologist in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, came about this theory by feeding two groups of mice, one with a 10% fat diet and the other with a 60% fat diet. The mice with the high fat diet developed similar symptoms as overweight humans. He then gave the fat group the extract from the Pinot noir grapes and “noted higher activity levels of PPAR-alpha and PPAR-gamma, two proteins that work within cells to metabolize fat and sugar.” Science Daily

I find this topic intriguing because I always believed alcohol was bad for your liver. I then started researching Cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis is a slowly progressing disease in which healthy liver tissue is replaced with scar tissue, eventually preventing the liver from functioning properly” Web MD. The three most typical causes of cirrhosis of the liver is Hepatitis C (insignificant in this purpose), a fatty liver, and alcohol abuse! So what could this mean in regards to Shay’s experiment with the mice?

What I take away from this are two things. First, he tested his theory only using a grape extract, not actual wine. It can be true that the extracts in purity within the grapes of the wine can diminish the growth of fatty cells in the liver, but can the rest of the sugar and alcohol in the wine overcompensate those extracts? Additionally, another fault might be is that it is performed with mice instead of humans. Though the fat in the mice can emulate those in humans, it is impossible to say if it would have the same effect without actually testing the chemicals on humans. Mice’s livers could grow or breakdown fat differently than humans.

I remained apprehensive so I continued researching the health benefits vs. drawbacks of wine. Resveratrol, a chemical found in red grapes, has been studied numerous times.  There seems to be a strong correlation between the benefit of resveratrol to the human heart and the consumption of red wine. Ever
yday Health

In conclusion I think it is safe to say that wine can have some health benefits, if drank in moderation. Too much of anything is bad for you, and that evidently includes wine.

When I was younger, I sang everywhere and anywhere. All day long you could hear my brothers screaming “shut up” or “stop singing already” but I just tuned them out and continued to belt out broadway show tunes. I loved singing, so I continued to practice all the time. I took lessons to extend my range and learn how to perform cool tricks like runs.

About five years later, I developed nodules on my vocal chords. I had to attend vocal therapy, and relearn how to sing. In order to do this, I had to break the muscle memory instilled in my head.

Muscle memory is having the ability to perform a motor skill unconsciously due to previous repetition. (ebooks) Most of the time we use muscle memory in our everyday lives without even realizing it. In fact I am using muscle memory right now while typing this blog. Anyways in music, muscle memory allows us to mindlessly perform. This is because our muscles have more than one nucleus, so when we learn more, our muscles grow as well as the nuclei within our muscles. This studied concept proves that even if you don’t perform the motor skill for a while, the nuclei in your muscles can easily retain the information. For example, if you study a song on the piano and don’t play it for a few months, after a few minutes of trying you will remember the song. Breaking my old habits and muscle memory was one of the most physically challenging tasks I’ve ever had to do. With every note sang, I had to be fully conscious of my bodies movement and actions. (exercise biology ). Just from experience, I think breaking a previous muscle memory is just as hard if not harder than learning a new one.

After retraining my vocal chords for about two year, I began guitar lessons. Personally I thought it was much easier learning the guitar than relearning how to sing. It took the same amount of time to be able to instill the physical techniques into my muscles, but it was much easier mentally. I didn’t have to be as cautious about doing things wrong rather I could just starting from scratch.

Muscle memory doesn’t just grow over night. In fact, in order to fully master an instrument you’ve needed to practice for 10,000 hours. (Criver) In music, it is vital to practice and gain stronger muscle memory in order to be able to focus on the creativity rather than the physicality.

We have all heard the saying beauty is pain. Well one of those painful endeavors includes wearing high heels. Wearing heels has always been a go to for me when getting dressed up at night. They make your legs appear leaner, your outfit appear nicer, they have always just seemed like the obvious choice when picking out an outfit. Of corse by the end of the night, my friends can always count on hearing me complain about the pain in my feet as I wobble home, but that pain has always been sacrificed for fashion. As ridiculous as that sounds, this is true for a lot of women. But what if I were to tell you that wearing high heels can have a lasting affect on your body besides from that simple pain in your foot? Would you stop wearing them?

High heels can cause more damage to the human body than just aching feet at the end of the night. When you wear a high enough heel, it causes strain on your body, and if they are worn enough, the stains can stay with you for the rest of your life. The higher your heels are, the more pressure and strain you are shifting to the ball of your feet and toes. A one inch heel puts 22% more pressure, a 2 inch heel puts 57% more pressure, and a 3 inch heel puts 76% more pressure. (The Spine Health Institute ). This added pressure to the front of your feet can cause ingrown toenails, bunions, and even nerve damage. The shape of a foot in a heel leads to strained muscles, which can wind up shortening the muscles in your calves and back. They can also shorten your Achilles tendon because it becomes so tight. (Osteopathic ). When the pressure is put to the front of your feet, you tend to learn forward in order to keep balanced. So when walking “you have to thrust your hips forward, arch your back, and push out your chest. That familiar sexy stance works the outer hip muscles and tendons hard (and not in a good way).” (Women’s Health Mag)

When you are an older women, are you going to be the person limping around because you decided high heels were worth it? To not avoid wearing heels, some tricks include; not wearing them for long periods of time, stretching your muscles out before, or try to buy shoes with leather insoles so your foot doesn’t slide forward!  (The Spine Health institute ). At the end of the day, it is up to the individual women to decide whether current fashion or future health is more important. So next time you hear the slogan “beauty is pain” you know that pain may not just be temporary.

When I was ten years old, I sat by my grandmothers chair side as she received yet another round of chemo therapy. She told me how she wasn’t aware of the diseases cigarettes caused. During the 1940’s, her prime smoking years, the direct causality between smoking and lung cancer was unthought of. As we learned in class, scientist like E. Cuyler Hammond had made vast improvements throughout the 50’s showing that tobacco smokers were more likely to die than non tobacco smokers, yet their new found evidence could still only be considered a correlation. Even Ernst Ludwig Wynder’s publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association, with 684 proven cases, was still only considered to be a correlation! This 1950’s post did decrease the number of smokers in America from 50% of the population to 20% of the population, yet it wasn’t until 1975 when “The Smoking Beagles” proved to Americans that smoking in fact did cause Lung Cancer.

Even with the amount of improvements and evidence that cigarettes are a direct causality to lung cancer, it still took experiment after experiment and a numerous amount of years to fully prove the causality to be true. So is todays weed smoking deja vu? Is it possible that weed can cause the same degree of bodily harm as tobacco smoking? Heavy marijuana smokers typically inhale a larger amount of smoke for a longer period in comparison to a heavy tobacco smoker. This means the weed smokers have more tar in their lower respiratory track than heavy tobacco smokers. (http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1513/AnnalsATS.201212-127FR). It has also been acknowledged that repetitive weed smokers have developed diseases such as chronic bronchitis.

Dr. Donald Tashkin, a professor at UCLA, has been studying the relationship between marijuana and lung cancer for over 30 years. In 2005, he announced his new finding that despite what he initially thought, there was not a direct correlation between weed and lung cancer (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html). Though he does hypothesize that the consumption of weed is still harmful to the human body, through his case study of 1200 people, he is confident that marijuana and lung cancer are not associated with each other.

Though I am not sure of the implications weed has on the body today, I believe that it will be considered hazardous in the future. The inhalation of a significant amount of smoke can only lead to damages in the lungs and respiratory system. I do believe as time continues and science evolves even more, there will be new found research that specifies the impairment of weed to the human body.

Some kids show up to college and binge drink to make themselves feel more comfortable. The assumption is that alcohol will loosen them up, even make them less nervous. Well, the assumption is right. Whether we’ve seen in it a movie or in a frat house on Prospect ave, most of us have seen someone spill the drunken truth. But why does it take a few beers or a couple of mixed drinks for people to loosen up and say how they really feel?

It turns out that alcohol interferes with the brains connections from the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex, and as a result it interjects on the part of the brain that regulates impulsive behavior (Science Net Links ). The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for emotional responses (The Brain). So after a few drinks depending on the person’s body size, they become more impulsive, and willing to say what is ever on their mind. Along with impulsivity, Bruce Bartholow, a teacher at the University of Missouri, discovered “It’s not as though people do drunken things because they’re not aware of their behavior, but rather they seem to be less bothered by the implications or consequences of their behavior than they normally would be”.  (Body Odd). Bartholow came to this conclusion after experimenting the effects of alcohol with 67 participants. One third of the group was given alcohol, one third was sober, and one third was given a placebo drink. Every group had to participate in a computer challenge which was created for the participants to make errors. It turns out that the alcohol group was equally aware of the errors they made, but less alarmed when they made them. (Elite Daily).This proves that the saying “I didn’t know what I was doing I was drunk” is no longer a valid excuse!

In contrast to Bartholow’s research, Tim Stoddart argues that when people drink, they do not know what they are doing. He explains that the more one drinks, the more dopamine is released in the body. With an excess amount of dopamine in the brain, a person is unable to know the difference between a good decision and a bad decision. (Sober Nation).

Based off of research alone, I agree with Bartholow’s theory. He has shown the concept that people are aware of what they are doing, yet just don’t care through his computer testing. Either way, both theories suggest that the consumption of too much alcohol makes people act in uncontrollable way in which they say what is ever on their minds.