Do you suffer from nostesia?

Chances are, either you or a family member suffers from it.  It’s not a rare condition. In fact, by some estimates, one in five is afflicted with it.  Might you have it? 

Nostesia derives from two familiar words: nostalgia and amnesia. So it’s easy to understand that those afflicted with the disease long for the past, but have clearly forgotten that the “good old days” weren’t all that good.  Nostesiacs, it is said, have fallen victim to the “Golden Age Fallacy.”

Authors, bloggers, playwrights and pundits weigh in.   

Woody Allen, in his wildly creative film Midnight in Paris, offers insights when his lead character shares: “Nostalgia is denial; denial of the painful present. . . . And the name for this fallacy is called golden-age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

Author Jamie Vollmer, who coined the word nostesia, informs us that “written expressions of . . .  disapproval regarding ‘these kids today’ and ‘these schools today’ go back as far as Plato.”

And how about the phrase “age of uncertainty?” How long has that been around? Says author Dan Gardner, as quoted in thefourthrevolution.org: “We call our time the ‘age of uncertainty‘, believing that there is something uniquely uncertain about this moment. But the phrase ‘age of uncertainty,’ which has appeared in the New York Times 5,720 times, made its debut in 1924!”

To those who maintain that the world “was simpler back then,” blogger Erik Rasmussen delivers his verdict: “Remember back when you were a child, and the world wasn’t so complicated and messed up? That was a simpler time, wasn’t it? Wrong! It was a simpler time for you because you were a child, free to play and almost entirely free from responsibility. We live in the most peaceful time in all of human history.”

Further, Rasmussen rejects the theory that Smartphones are making us more lonely, more isolated, less social. He explains: “As with absolutely everything, you can do Smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their Smartphone. But I’ve also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?!”

Added Jon Krutulis of trythought.com: “Even from the perspective of a few hundred years ago, we live like kings. We enjoy luxuries and benefits that were simply unknown in times we credit with being ‘the good ‘ol days’.” Added Krutulis: “It is easy to look at the social problems that plague us and claim that our morals are in decline; however, look at the things we have conquered: disease, slavery, serfdom, inequality, etc. We have alleviated suffering, pain, and injustice that made life in these Golden Times ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.”

A host of books affirm the notion that nostesia is an illness without merit. Author Norman Finkelstein, in The Way Things Never Were, points to the 1950s and 1960s when the fear of communism and nuclear attack reached into our schools.  Author David Fryxell, in Good ‘Ole Days My Ass, shares over 600 “terrifying truths” that reveal that the Good Ole Days, for most people, were a “filthy, dangerous, exhausting slog simply to survive.” And Joseph Campbell, in Getting It Wrong, dismantles prominent media-driven myths about times gone by.  

Is there a cure for nostesia?  Vollmer insists there is: “Nostesia can be cured, but it must be aggressively treated.” So what’s the cure? Powerful doses of good news, along with frequent reminders of the struggles endured by our predecessors. 

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Which of our senses has no art form?

We treat our senses to all sorts of pleasures – music for our ears, art for our eyes, perfume and gastronomy for our nose and tongue. But what about touch?  It may be the only sense without an art form.

“Touch is the first system to come online, and the foundations of human relationships are all touch,” explains Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, in a New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik. “Skin to skin, parent to child, touch is the social language of our social life.”

At our core, human beings are social animals and research has confirmed that we have an innate ability to communicate emotions via touch alone. In a fascinating series of experiments, researchers demonstrated that human beings were capable of communicating eight distinct emotions – anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, and sadness – through touch alone, with accuracy rates as high as 78 percent. "I was surprised," said DePauw University psychologist Mathew Hertenstein, in a Psychology Today article written by Rich Chillot. “I thought the accuracy would be at chance level," about 25 percent. (In the experiment, two people were separated by a curtain – one was given an emotion, then told to communicate it to the other via touch alone.)

Whether it’s a handshake, a high-five or a deep and warm embrace, touch has its own special language.

It’s unique in so many respects:

•         “. . . During intense grief or fear, but also in ecstatic moments of joy or love . . . only the language of touch can fully express what we feel,” noted Chillot.
•          Said Gopnik: “Perhaps the reason that touch has no art form is that its supremacy makes it hard to escape. We can shut our eyes and cover our ears, but it’s our hands that do it when we do. We can’t shut off our skins.”
•          Ryan Genz, co-designer of the Hug Shirt told Gopnik: “We can transmit voice, we can transmit images – but we [can’t] transmit touch.” Commenting on social media trends, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, in an interview with Bloomberg.com, noted: “In the end, we rely heavily on touch and we still haven't figured out how to do virtual touch. Maybe once we can do that we will have cracked a big nut.”

What have we learned about touch? 

The scientific inquiry of touch is still in its infancy. Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist David Linden, author of “Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind,” told Gopnik: “Over the past 50 years, there have been probably a hundred papers about vision for every paper about touch in the scientific literature.” Linden added: “People go blind often. But almost no one is touch-blind – the fact that you have to say ‘touch-blind’ is a hint of the problem. Being touch-blind isn’t compatible with life. There are no national foundations for the hard-of-touch.”

Nonetheless, new as it is, enormous strides have been made on quantifying the benefits of touch. University of Miami School of Medicine's Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute, has linked touch, in the form of massage, to a slew of benefits, including better sleep, reduced irritability, and increased sociability among infants – as well as improved growth of preemies.

According to the Institute, touch has also: lessened pain, lowered blood pressure, stimulate the hippocampus, lowered heart rates, reduced stress hormones, increased levels of oxytocin, improved pulmonary function, increased growth in infants, lowered blood glucose and improved immune function.  In one study, according to an article by Maria Konnikova for the New Yorker, Fields found that “even short bursts of touch – as little as fifteen minutes in the evening, in one of her studies – not only enhance growth and weight gain in children but also led to emotional, physical, and cognitive improvements in adults.”

What else have we learned?

•         Newborns that are touched gain weight faster and have superior mental and motor skill development – an advantage they retain for months. (Source: Livestrong.com article by Mary Bauer);
•         There is some evidence that the level of aggression and violence among children is related to lack of touching (Source: Livestrong.com article by Mary Bauer);
•         People who are touched briefly on the arm or shoulder are more likely to comply with requests such as volunteering for charity activities. (Source: in-mind.org article authored by Mandy Tjew A Sin and Sander Koole);
•         Touch predicted performance across all the NBA teams (Source: team led by psychologist Michael Kraus);
•         In a series of studies, diners who were touched by the waitress (e.g., a touch on the shoulder) left between 18% and 36% more tips than diners who were not touched (Source: professors April Crusco and Christopher Wetzel)
•         At a home for the elderly, though who were touched while being encouraged to eat consumed more calories and protein up to five days after the touch (Source: Eaton, Mitchell-Bonair & Friedman).

Teens, atheists, senior citizens, doctors and teachers

•         By the time children reach their teen years, they receive only half as much touching as they did in the early part of their lives. Adults touch each other even less. (Source: Livestrong.com article by Mary Bauer)
•         Warm climates tend to produce cultures that are more liberal about touching than colder regions (Source: Psychology Today article by Chillot);
•         Atheists and agnostics touch more than religious types, "probably because religions often teach that some kinds of touch are inappropriate or sinful,” according to professor Peter Anderson of San Diego University, as quoted by Chillot);
•         Senior citizens receive the least touching of any age group (Source: Livestrong.com article by Mary Bauer); and
•         More touch-oriented doctors, teachers, and managers get higher ratings (Source: Psychology Today article by Chillot).

Would more touch benefit us all?  No doubt, say the experts. But in a touch-phobic society such as ours it’s challenging to create a culture that promotes touch (people in Spain, for instance, were found to be far better at communicating via touch than their American counterparts). In 1998, Fields called for “a shift in the social-political attitude toward touch,” noting that, “leaving your humanity behind every time you leave home isn't very appealing.”

The future of touch?

Imagine an online shopper “feeling” the linen of a summer shirt while sitting at their computer. Imagine receiving a long-distance Swedish massage. Or imagine a surgeon in Los Angeles performing surgery in Botswana, and actually feeling the flesh and organs of the patient.

It’s all possible.

So hug a friend today. It’ll feel good.

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True or false: we use only 10% of your brains?

The answer is false, just one of the many neuromyths (i.e., misconceptions about the brain and learning) that we carry around as lay people.  And a study of teachers in the UK and the Netherlands found that teachers also believe in many neuromyths, leading to concern that some of the brain-based educational programs being adopted worldwide are not necessarily serving students well. 

Of further concern, the study found that “possessing greater general knowledge about the brain does not appear to protect teachers from believing in neuromyths.” Indeed, teachers who scored highest on general knowledge about the brain and learning believed in more neuromyths than their colleagues.  Said the researchers:

“Possessing greater general knowledge about the brain does not appear to protect teachers from believing in neuromyths. This demonstrates the need for enhanced interdisciplinary communication to reduce such misunderstandings in the future and establish a successful collaboration between neuroscience and education.”

In the study, teachers in the UK and the Netherlands were given 32 statements about the brain and learning and were asked to rate them as correct or incorrect.  Fifteen of the statements were neuromyths, and the study found that teachers believed 49% of these.

FACT OR FICTION?  

To test your knowledge we’ve selected a dozen of those statements (e.g., on exercise, sugar intake, sleep cycles and learning style). Which ones do you think are correct? (answers appear below*)

1.      Language acquisition – Children must acquire their native language before a second language is learned. If they do not do so neither language will be fully acquired.

2.      Physiology – Boys have bigger brains than girls.

3.      Rehearsal – Extended rehearsal of some mental processes can change the shape and structure of some parts of the brain.

4.      Left vs. right – The left and right hemisphere of the brain always work together.

5.      Hemispheric dominance – Differences in hemispheric dominance (left brain, right brain) can help explain individual differences among learners.

6.      New cells – Learning is not due to the addition of new cells to the brain.

7.      Learning style – Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic).

8.      Breakfast – Academic achievement can be affected by skipping breakfast.

9.      Sugar – Children are less attentive after consuming sugary drinks and/or snacks.

10.   Sleep – Circadian rhythms (“body-clock”) shift during adolescence, causing pupils to be tired during the first lessons of the school day.

11.   Learning style – Individual learners show preferences for the mode in which they receive information (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic).

12.   Exercise – Short bouts of co-ordination exercises can improve integration of left and right hemispheric brain function.

The researchers explain: “. . . [E]xamples of neuromyths include such ideas as ‘we only use 10% of our brain’, ‘there are multiple intelligences’, ‘there are left- and right brain learners’, “there are critical periods for learning’ and ‘certain types of food can influence brain functioning’ (e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation, and Development, 2002; Geake, 2008; Purdy, 2008; Howard-Jones, 2010). Some of these misunderstandings have served as a basis for popular educational programs, like Brain Gym or the VAK approach (classifying students according to a VAK learning style). These programs claim to be ‘brain-based’ but lack scientific validation (Krätzig and Arbuthnott, 2006; Waterhouse, 2006; Stephenson, 2009; Lindell and Kidd, 2011). A fast commercialization has led to a spread of these programs into classrooms around the world.”

The study was conducted by Sanne Dekker and Jelle Jolles (VUUniversity Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands)  and Paul Howard-Jones (University of Bristol, Bristol, UK).

*statements 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11 are correct