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Bokgwai
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Name: BokGwai Country: United States State: New York Metro: Binghamton Gender: Male
Interests: Church Softball, New York Mets, Bible investigating, cooking, music (performance), writing, micro-agriculture Expertise: personal belly button exploration Occupation: Mechanical Engineering Industry: Pharmaceutical Automation
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| Read a couple of interesting articles today. I had a few thoughts and tried to condense them into bullets. (Articles follow below the bullet points) 1) Lonelieness can be spread through negative feelings and or attitudes towards other people. Really? I guess I can see how having a negative outlook on life can drive other people away, and I can see how some people can take on some of those beliefs and begin propagating them themselves. However, this seems like a bit of a stretch to be a scientific conclusion. It sounds like they collected a bunch of anecdotes and felt that it was sufficient to publish as science. I'm not denying that this happens; I can vouch for myself when I say that I have walked away from a difficult heart to heart and felt my outlook affected by the conversation. But I would like to see better data collection before an conclusion like this is published. Perhaps a more specific study is warranted by this initial one. 2) Facebook, twitter, and other social networks are not suitable substitions for real life friendships or relationships. In fact, it can drive a person to feel even more lonely. This is a "duh" statement. Although, I did find it interesting that they thought that social networking sites can be used to synergize the existing relationships. Synergize. I never thought of it that way. But I guess it's true when it is used to keep up to date and stay in touch with the people you don't get to see every day. Also, I though it was interesting that social networking sites was a boon to people who were handicapped and physically disabled. This makes a lot of sense, I just never thought about this. 3) The idea of community design was highly interesting. Probably interesting enough to garner its own post. I am reminded of the extensive social engineering I heard about and witnessed in Singapore. I think about the community design that they have there, with their individual, sustainable communities. I think of campus dorms and the sense of community/unity that existed within dorms. I think about the activities RAs would organize to keep people on the same floor in touch with one another... as well the the community wide activities within dorm buildings or dorm communities. Even the communal eating areas were a boon to relationships and keeping in touch with one another. Can this kind of community design work outside of the college campus? It appears to have worked to some degree in Singapore. Many thoughts abound. et tu? Thoughts? The articles are below. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34209727/ns/health-behavior/ Loneliness can be contagious, new study findsFeelings of isolation can spread through groups of friends as easily as a cold | Loneliness can not only make you feel more socially isolated, it can make you more anxious, more shy and cause you to believe you have poor social skills. | Featurepics stock | |
By Diane Mapes msnbc.com contributor
We’re used to hearing about people spreading colds and flus. But according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there’s another human condition that’s equally contagious: loneliness. “Loneliness spreads across time,” says John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the study. “It travels through people. Instead of a germ, it’s transmitted through our behaviors.” The longitudinal study, conducted by the University of Chicago, the University of California-San Diego and Harvard, interviewed more than 5,000 people over the course of 10 years, tracking their friendship histories and their reports of loneliness. Participants were part of the Framingham Heart Study, which has studied cardiovascular risks in people in Framingham, Mass., since 1948 and has since been expanded to include other research topics such as loneliness and depression. In the study, researchers found that lonely individuals tend to move to the fringes of social networks (and, no, we’re not talking about Facebook or Twitter here), where they have fewer and fewer friends. But before they move to the periphery, they “infect” or “transmit” their feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends. With fewer close relationship, these friends then become lonely and eventually move to the fringes of the social network, again passing their loneliness on to others. Thus, the cycle continues. “When people get lonely, they’re more likely to interact negatively with others they encounter,” says Cacioppo. “If you have two neighbors and they’re friends and one becomes lonely, they’ll start to treat the other less friendly. Ultimately, they’re less likely to be friends.” Ironically, loneliness can not only make you feel more socially isolated, it can make you more anxious, more shy and cause you to believe you have poor social skills. Cacioppo says previous research also shows that loneliness can make people less trustful of others and can make the brain more “defensive.” “Your brain tells you people are rejecting you,” he says. “Loneliness may warp the message that you’re hearing.” A biological signal While loneliness can be “contagious,” Cacioppo says it’s important to note it’s not a disease, nor is it a personal weakness. It’s actually a biological reaction, much like hunger or thirst or pain. “Society tends to think of it as an individual characteristic — there are just loners,” he says. “But that’s the wrong conception of what loneliness is. It’s a biological signal motivating us to correct something that we need for genetic survival. We need quality relationships. We don’t survive well on our own.” Studies, in fact, show loneliness can actually be harmful to both mental and physical health, leading to depression, high blood pressure, increases in the stress hormone cortisol, and compromised immunity. Unfortunately, quality friendships can sometimes be difficult to find or maintain in our busy, BlackBerried society. “I get lonely sometimes but I tend not to seek people out to do things because they’re all married or committed or need to find a babysitter and then it just turns into a circus,” says Tina Kurfurst, a 46-year-old database coordinator from Seattle. “I went out to dinner with some people from work the other night and one of the women kept saying, ‘Wow, you’re funny, why don’t we hang out more often?’ And I just thought, ‘Well, because you have a husband and a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old and it just doesn’t happen. You don’t have time for me.” Stephanie Smith, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Erie, Co., says she tries to encourage her lonely patients — which can range from college students to stay-at-home moms to high-powered CEOs — to find at least one friend in their same situation. “If you have kids, know at least one other person who has kids,” she says. “Or if you don’t, find someone who doesn’t. It’s important to have people in your life who share your interests and your stage of life.” But you don’t have to have a slew of BFFs. “Sometimes people get overwhelmed and think ‘I need to have 15 best friends,’” she says. “But it doesn’t need to be that big. One friend, one relationship, can be very powerful.” Facebook and Twitter are no substitute for the real thing, though. “If you’re isolated due to a disability or a spouse with Alzheimer’s, then Facebook can be a real boon,” says Cacioppo. “But if you’re spending your time on Facebook rather than face-to-face with friends, it increases your loneliness. It’s about quality. Lonely people use social networks as a substitute; non-lonely people use them to synergize the relationships they already have. The person with 4,000 friends on Facebook may well be a very lonely person.” The secret, says Cacioppo, is realizing loneliness is nothing more than your body sending you a signal. “All normal humans feel lonely at some point in time, just like they feel hunger and thirst and pain,” he says. “But while we have cupboards filled with food, taps for water and medications for pain, we don’t have anything comparable for loneliness. I’m not saying you need a cupboard full of friends, but if you feel lonely, pay attention and take the time to repair it.” http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1943748,00.html Feeling Alone Together: How Loneliness SpreadsLisa Berkshire / Illustration Works / Corbis Despite the way it feels, loneliness often has nothing to do with being alone. For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays, for instance. Walk into a bustling shopping mall or a buzzing holiday party this time of year, and even within a crowd — or perhaps especially inside a crowd — it's possible to feel unbearably alone. New research from experts in neuroscience and social science may give us a clue as to why. Although we tend to think of it as a self-contained emotional state — a condition that affects people individually, either by circumstance or by dint of an antisocial personality — researchers now argue that loneliness is much farther reaching than that. John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, believes it is a social phenomenon that exists within a society and can spread through it, from person to person, like a disease. And while everyone feels lonely once in a while, for some it becomes a persistent condition, one that has been associated with more serious psychological ills like depression, sleep dysfunction, high blood pressure and even an increased risk of dementia in older age. For his latest study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Cacioppo partnered with leading social-network scientists Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, the team best known for their series of studies showing that emotional states and behaviors — including happiness, obesity and quitting smoking — can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people. To examine whether the contagion effect existed with loneliness, the researchers used the same data set that Christakis and Fowler had mined for their earlier studies — the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing trial originally begun in 1948 to identify risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Thanks to the meticulous way the trial was initially set up, with investigators noting the close family members and friends of each participant to ensure follow-up over the years, Cacioppo, Christakis and Fowler now had access to a rich social network for each volunteer in their study — from family members and friends to colleagues and neighbors. Cacioppo and his team focused on the children of the original Framingham cohort, which included more than 5,200 middle-aged men and women. Starting in 1983, more than 4,500 volunteers were asked to fill out three questionnaires, spaced two years apart, about how many days in the previous week they had felt lonely. Because most of the participants' friends and family members were also part of the Framingham study, the scientists could track, over time, whether one person's report of loneliness had any impact on the feelings of isolation in other members in his or her social network. Researchers were thus able to rule out the possibility that lonely people simply congregated with other lonely people, or that a shared environmental event, such as a fatal fire in the neighborhood, could have triggered mass feelings of loneliness. The results were illuminating: If one person reported feeling lonely at one evaluation, his closest connections (either family or close friends) were 52% more likely to also report feeling lonely two years later. The effect was strongest among those in close relationships, waning as the connections became more distant, but remained significant up to three degrees of separation — in other words, one lonely person could influence whether his friend's friend's friend felt lonely. "Loneliness has been conceived in the past as depression, introversion, shyness or poor social skills," says Cacioppo. "Those turn out not to be right. Research we and others have done suggests that it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain." In other words, loneliness is not so much a symptom of being companionless, as it is a driving force behind social isolation. Rather than simply reflecting the emotional state of one person, Cacioppo says, loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well or not so well-integrated we are as a population. That's an important measure, he says, because we are, by nature, a social species; we feed off of our interactions with each other and thrive when we are inspired, challenged, and supported by one another. While occasional feelings of isolation are perfectly natural, and normal, the new study suggests that loneliness can begin to fester in a society like a cancer if it is allowed to transmit unchecked from one person to another. But how does a person "catch" loneliness? Based on the new data, Cacioppo theorizes that it is passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity. "People who feel lonely view the social world as more threatening," he says. "They may not be aware they are doing it, but lonely individuals think negatively about other people. So if you are my friend, and I started to treat you negatively, then over time, we would stop being friends. But in the meantime, our interactions caused you to treat other people less positively, so you're likely to lose friends, and they in turn are likely to lose friends. That appears to be the means of transmission for loneliness." People may be spreading their negative feelings simply by frowning or making other unpleasant facial expressions, throwing out hurtful remarks, or even adopting uninviting body postures. Over time, lonely people find themselves banished to the periphery of their social networks; as they lose friends and connections, they are pushed to the fringes, where they are only marginally connected to the community. Viewed that way, say experts, the loneliness factor in a neighborhood or an apartment complex or a workplace may be an indication of how cohesive, and therefore, mentally healthy, that population is. "Loneliness can be a signal for when that social connection is fraying," says Cacioppo. If these results hold up, then, treating loneliness should involve more than individual therapy for patients. It requires addressing larger, society-based issues. "People are not going to realize that there is almost a wave of loneliness that is being propagated by people two or three connections removed from them," says Dr. Richard Suzman, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, which funded the new study. "This does suggest that one has got to look at both the network and individual simultaneously when you try to repair what seems to be a cascading, spiraling descent in which loneliness gets increasingly paired with isolation." That strategy may mean looking at things such as community design or social support networks that allow some populations to keep all their members hovering near the center of their networks, rather than drifting to the edges. It's not necessarily the number of connections people have that matters, but the quality of them. Communities that encourage regular interaction among its members, either through regular gatherings or mutually beneficial projects that require everyone's input, for example, are more likely to foster stronger, more meaningful connections than those that don't encourage social investment. "Ultimately what we hope to do is not only intervene at the individual level, but also at the city planner and development level as well," says Cacioppo. | | |
| So I'm posting for the second time this year. I think I've contracted some kind of illness. Perhaps something terminal. Otherwise, I have no other explanation for this mighty resurgence. And with this post, I'm going "back to basics;" I'm sharing something I love.
I accidentally came across this today when I was walking down the hall. I saw a couple of purple streaks in the sky and my interest was piqued. "Could there be more?" I walked around the building and found the side facing west. I immediately grabbed a couple of coworkers to come witness. I texted a friend. I snapped a few shots. And now here I am, with you.
As I've said before, beauty is meant to be shared.

Hopefully, there will be more to come. | | |
| I saw this article the other and found it to be fascinating. Not from the usual perspective of "enduring love and marriage is awesome" blah blah blah. No, rather this was interesting to me because it was an opportunity to see things from the perspective of someone who was married to someone who was going through a mid-life crisis. The mid-life crisis, of course, is similar to the quarter life crisis or any kind of identity crisis that most people eventually go through. Identity crises are usually accompanied by a death of a dream. And being that the death of dreams is something near and dear to my heart (more to come on this), and I saw that Cate Song had posted it with positive responses, I decided to post this up as well. Those aren't fighting words, dearRead the article first, and then come back. Here are a few items I would like to point out: 1) The husband who goes through the crisis immediately points to the wife as being the problem. "My life is not going the way I wanted it to go, therefore, these people around me are the problem. They are holding me back." Or in this case, he is blaming the wife. Instead of blaming others for the failure of his dream, he needed to realize that his dream wasn't going to happen the way he expected it to. He didn't become the person he had hoped to be. He was watching his mythological self die before his eyes. 2) Being the "victim" of his dying dream and the people around him, he felt like he had to take control of the situation. Since we have no indication whatsoever that either husband or wife is a Christian, nor any allusion to trust in a higher power, it makes sense that both parties felt that they needed to be strong and take control in one way or another. This is significantly different from the theoretical Christian response, which is to let go of control and fall on your face and petition God to intercede. Of course, I say theoretical because most Christians avoid this route and go straight to taking control of the situation and wrestling it out of God's "untrustworthy" hands. So much for letting God be "Lord of my life." 3) There are some who say that marriage is to serve as an example of the relationship we, as Christians, have with Christ, our bridegroom. With that paradigm in place, the wife is the Christ figure in this particular example. There are times when we are angry with God and blame him for the things happening in our lives. The wife wisely realizes that she isn't the problem, nor is she the cause of the problem. Furthermore, she offers to help him gain the space he needs. At the same time, she keeps the invitation open - he was welcome to come back at any time. His place at the table was always set. There was always room for the prodigal son to come home. 4) She wisely recognized that she couldn't solve his problem. In most relationships, people vacillate between two extremes in a time of crisis: Try to fix the problem and force a happy face on it or abandon and leave. Her friends demanded that she get a lawyer and end it. Her internal struggle was to persuade him to not give up and make it work. But she chose neither. She recognized that this was his problem to solve, and she gave him the room to do it. 5) The fourth paragraph from the end reads: "When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal."
There it is. Childhood myths. Our mythological selves. Our destiny. Our American dream. Whatever it is you want to call it, they all mean the same thing. A false, alternate reality that is unachievable and unattainable. At some point in everyone's lives, our dreams fail us. Our happiness is lost. And somehow, we have to pick up the pieces and move on. We have to redetermine the root of our happiness and satisfaction. Is it performance based? Is is based on how other people feel about us? Is it from within, as the author states? Or is it based on the satisfaction of being wholly and completely loved by God? And this love will not change, no matter what we do right or what we do wrong. All in all, I thought that this was a great story with some great points. A lot of things to think on. Sadly, most people don't think about such things until they're facing a death of their own. Hopefully, this will provide some food for thought. On another level, I felt that it was eye opening to be able to see things from a different perspective. I definitely appreciated being able to see her perspective as if it were through the eyes of Jesus. I hope that you might appreciate it too. age | | |
| I have long described how watching the movie "Men in Black" destroyed my faith in the inerrancy of science. It didn't invalidate science as a process and a way of studying things. But it certainly caused me to think twice about what we as people hold onto as inerrant truth and "written in stone." Truthfully, the nature of science is that we are ever learning. The things that we "knew to be true" 1000 years ago are no longer true today. Imagine what we will know to be true tomorrow. It can be somewhat terrifying when I sit down in those quiet moments and spend any amount of time thinking about it. Today, I ran across a really interesting article detailing a new discovery. It's an exciting and amazing find that will change the way science interprets history; there is a giant single celled organisim that is large enough to leave a trail in the dirt where ever it goes. They say that it may be the oldest living fossil on record. But don't let the excitement of the discovery overshadow the significance of this finding - it will *change the way science interprets history.* And that's the issue at hand here. Incorrectly interpreted history has been passed of as fact and law since the beginning of time. Whether it's the recounting of an event by multiple witnesses from different perspectives with different stories or it's a detective trying to put together the pieces of a crime scene, there is a ceiling to what we can actually know. There is a limit to how much we can conclude and profess as fact. Take a look at the link to the article. Read some of the comments by the readers who hate creationists. There are people there bemoaning a magic box quote from one of the principle scientists, but they completely miss the fact that everything they believed in before has just been "corrected," and stands to be corrected for the rest of eternity. Take an opportunity to think outside of the box here and leave a comment. http://www.richarddawkins.net/article,3361,Single-Celled-Giant-Upends-Early-Evolution,Discoveryhttp://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/11/20/gromia-cambrian.html | | |
| Every day, we as people have to wrestle with the question of “how much imperfection am I willing to accept and still stay in relationship and community with this person?” Discuss. | | |
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