Around the sun leaving a bright trail behind. For more than

The Placebo Effect

The mind-body effect should not be surprising in view of the experience over the years with placebos. The term 'placebo⁹ is used to describe a 'pill' that contains no medical ingredients but that often produces the same effect as genuine medication. Placebos provide ample proof that expectations can have an effect on body chemistry. According to a recent article on placebos in Medical World News, studies conducted over the past 25 years have shown that placebos satisfactorily relieved symptoms in an average of 35 per cent of patients tested. These symptoms include: fever, severe post-operative pain, anginal pain, headache, and anxiety, among other complaints. The explanation for this strange phenomenon is that the human mind can create actual changes in body chemistry As a result of what it believes. If, for example, a person believes that a certain medication contains a substance that can accomplish a specific need, the body

page 232

tends to move in that direction.

An increasing number of scientists now contend that the body’s healing system and its belief system are closely related. That is why hope, faith, and the will to live can be vital factors in the struggle against disease. The belief system converts positive expectations into plus factors in any contest against illness.

110

MEMORY
Memory, like sweatshirts, comes in three sizes. There is a sensory storage system which can hold information for only a very brief time period. Next is a short-term storage which can hold a small amount of information. Finally, you have a long-term storage system which holds vast amounts of information.

What psychological processes are involved in remembering a stimulus which is briefly perceived, such as the license number of a car? Psychologists have discovered that a stimulus is maintained in a sensory storage system which holds information for less than a second. The sensory storage system is called iconic memory if visual stimuli are involved or echoic memory if the stimulation is auditory.

Your sensory storage system appears to operate in a fairly automatic way. There seems to be no voluntary action you can take to prolong the life of information from sensory storage without using the next stage of memory, called short-term memory (STM), or primary memory. Information can be recycled in short-term memory by a process called rehearsal. When rehearsal is prevented or disrupted, information in short-term memory is lost and so cannot enter long-term memory (LTM). However, once information has entered long-term memory, rehearsal is no longer necessary to guarantee that information is not forgotten. While preventing items from being forgotten is the major difficulty in short-term memory, long-term memory suffers from the opposite problem. There is so much information contained in long-term memory that locating and retrieving this information can be quite difficult. Indeed, psychologists distinguish between information which is available in long-term memory and that which is accessible. All information in long-term memory is considered available; that is, it can be remembered under the proper circumstances. But only that information which actually is remembered is accessible. Thus, accessible information is always available, but available information cannot always be accessible. The process of obtaining memory information from wherever it is stored is called retrieval. In order for information to be accessible, it must first be retrieved. Retrieval of information from long-term memory is a difficult process and is not always successful. Retrieval from short-term memory is considerably easier, and many models of short-term memory assume that if an item is available in short-term memory, it is automatically accessible.

While information in short-term memory is coded primarily by acoustic features (how the words sound when spoken), information in long-term memory is organized primarily according to what the words mean. While

page 234

interference in short-term memory is based upon acoustic relationships, interference in long-term memory occurs among Semantically related words.

The most dramatic distinction between short and long-term memory Systems lies in their respective capacities - the number of items each system can store. Short-term memory has a very limited capacity compared to the almost unlimited storage capacity of long-term memory.

111

EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

Education in Britain is primarily the responsibility of local educational authorities Although the central government lays down guidelines and provides or withholds money. From the end of the Second World War Until the 1960's, education under state control depended on the '11-plus' examination, taken by all pupils between the ages of eleven and twelve. The most successful went to grammar schools or direct-grant schools, while the rest went to secondary modern schools. Since the 1960's, almost all local authorities have introduced comprehensive schools, where all pupils attend the same school, even though there is usually an attempt to separate them according to ability once they are there. Local authorities where the Labour Party is usually in control tend, by now, to be almost completely comprehensive; those where the Conservatives hold power have been more resistant to the change.

Throughout this period, the public schools, which are private in all except name, have continued to exist, independent of the state system. Some became direct-grant schools, accepting students who had passed the 11-plus examination and were paid for by local authorities, but this system came to an end in many cases when a Labour-controlled local authority refused to go on paying the grants because of its commitment to comprehensive education.

The public debate in England and Wales between the supporters of comprehensive schools and those who want to retain or revive grammar schools continues unabated. Every year statistics are produced to demonstrate that comprehensive schools provide better education than grammar schools (and in some cases, better than the prestigious private sector). These statistics are immediately contradicted by others proving the opposite. The local authorities have, on the whole, been converted to the comprehensive system, in some cases with enThusiasm, in others with marked reluctance. Yet, the real complication of the debate stems from the fact that Although arguments are usually stated in educational terms, almost all of them are based on political opinions.

It is clear that those local authorities that have abolished grammar schools completely were determined that their experiment should succeed because of their belief that it is just as wrong to separate children by intelligence as by social class. Such authorities tend to associate grammar schools with the private sector they would also like to abolish if they had the opportunity. In their view, any system that

page 236

differentiates between children strengthens class barriers, and the fact that more upper-class children tend to go to university is not evidence that comprehensive schools are inferior; it is merely further evidence of the discrimination that already exists in society.

The defenders of grammar schools use examination results to show that children reach their maximum potential when placed with others of similar intelligence and point out that even in comprehensive schools they are put in different classes according to ability. It is difficult to believe, however, that this defence is inspired purely by a desire for academic excellence.

WHAT Is YOUR BEST TIME OF DAY?

Organisms exhibit biological rhythms. Some are short and can be measured in minutes or hours. Others last days or months. The idea that our bodies are in constant flux is fairly new and goes against traditional medical training. In the past, many doctors were taught to believe the body has a relatively stable, or homeostatic, internal environment. Any fluctuations were considered random and not meaningful enough to be studied.

As early as the 1940's, however, some scientists questioned the homeostatic view of the body. Franz Halberg, a young European scientist working in the United States, conducted a series of experiments on mice and noticed that the number of white blood cells in these animals was dramatically higher and lower at different times of the day. Gradually, such research spread to the study of biological rhythms in human beings, and the findings were sometimes startling. For example, the time of day when a person receives X-ray or drug treatment for cancer can affect treatment benefits and ultimately mean the difference between life and death.

This new science, the study of biological rhythms in human beings, is called chronobiology, and the evidence supporting it has become increasingly persuasive. Along the way, the scientific and medical communities are beginning to rethink their ideas about how the human body works, and gradually what had been considered a minor science just a few years ago is being studied in major universities and medical centers around the world.

With their new findings, they are teaching us things that can literally change our lives - by helping us organize ourselves so we can work with our natural rhythms rather than against them. This can enhance our outlook on life as well as our performance at work.

Because they are easy to detect and measure, more is known of daily -or circadian (Latin for ‘about a day') - rhythms than other types. The most obvious daily rhythm is the sleep / wake cycle. But there are other daily cycles as well: temperature, blood pressure, hormone levels. Amid these and the body's other changing rhythms, you are simply a different person at 9 a.m. than you are at 3 p.m. How you feel, how well you work, your level of alertness, your sensitivity to taste and smell, the degree with which you enjoy food or take pleasure in music - all are changing throughout the day. Most of us seem to reach our peak of alertness around noon. Soon after that, alertness declines, and sleepiness may set in by mid-afternoon.

page 238

Your short-term memory is best during the morning - in fact, about 15 per cent more efficient than at any other time of day. So, students, take heed: when faced with a morning exam, it really does pay to review your notes right before the test is given.

Long-term memory is different. Afternoon is the best time for learning material that you want to recall days, weeks or months later. Politicians, business executives or others who must learn speeches would be smart to do their memorizing during that time of day. If you are a student, it would be better for you to schedule your more difficult classes in the afternoon, rather than in the morning. You should also try to do most of your studying in the afternoon, rather than late at night. Many students believe they memorize better while burning the mid-night oil because their short-term recall is better during the wee hours of the morning than in the afternoon. But short-term memory won't help them much several days later, when they face the exam.

113

A NEW ICE AGE (1)

Over the past several years, researchers have dug deep into Atlantic sea-floor sediments and Greenland glaciers to study the chemistry of ancient mud and ice, and they are increasingly convinced that climate change is anything but smooth. "The transition from warm to frigid can come in a decade or two - a geological snap of the fingers", says Gerard Bond, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory: "The data have been coming out of Greenland for maybe two or three decades. But the first results were really so suprising that people weren't ready to believe them."

There is a growing understanding as well that ice ages are not uniformly icy, nor interglacial periods, i.e., periods between ice ages, unchangingly warm. About 40,000 years ago, for example, right in the middle of the last ice age, the world warmed briefly, forcing glaciers to retreat. And while the current interglacial period has been stably temperate, the previous one, according to at least one study, was evidently interrupted by frigid spells lasting hundreds of years. If that period was more typical than the present one, humanity's invention of agriculture, and Thus civilization, may have been possible only because of a highly unusual period of stable temperature - a fluke.

Just 150 years ago, the notion that much of the Northern Hemisphere had once been covered by thick sheets of ice was both new and highly controversial. Within a few decades, though, most scientists were convinced and began looking for explanations. Several suggested that astronomical cycles were involved, and by the 1930's the Yugoslav astronomer Milutin Milankovitch had constructed a coherent theory. The ice ages, he argued, were triggered by changes in the shape of the earth's slightly oval orbit around the sun and in the planet's axis of rotation. Studies of the chemical composition of ocean-floor sediments, which depend on climatic conditions when the material was laid down, more or less supported Milankovitch's glaciation.

predicted schedule of global