Category Archives: Mind Building

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Health24.com | Parent’s skin-to-skin hug does ease a baby’s pain, brain study suggests

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  • British researchers monitored infants’ brain activity while they had a painful heel lance to draw blood 
  • It was not possible to determine if infants that were held skin-to-skin by a parent felt less pain
  • Brain activity was, however, different in the infants that had skin-to-skin contact

Infants may feel less pain when held by a parent with skin-to-skin contact, a new UK study suggests.

“We have found when a baby is held by their parent with skin-on-skin contact, the higher-level brain processing in response to pain is somewhat dampened. The baby’s brain is also using a different pathway to process its response to pain,” said study co-author Lorenzo Fabrizi. He’s with University College London in the department of neuroscience, physiology and pharmacology.

“While we cannot confirm whether the baby actually feels less pain, our findings reinforce the important role of touch between parents and their newborn babies,” Fabrizi said in a college news release.

Painful heel lance

The study included 27 infants, up to about three months old, who were born premature or at term at UCL Hospitals in Britain.

The researchers monitored the infants’ brain activity while they had a painful heel lance to draw blood for testing.

During the procedure, the infants were either held by their mother skin-to-skin; held by their mother with clothing, or lying in a crib or incubator (most of those infants were swaddled).

The infants’ initial brain response to the pain of the heel lance was the same. But as it triggered four to five waves of brain activity, the later waves of brain activity were lower among those babies who were held skin-to-skin.

The dampening of the delayed response to pain in the infants who had skin contact with their mothers “suggests that parental touch impacts the brain’s higher-level processing. The pain might be the same, but how the baby’s brain processes and reacts to that pain depends on their contact with a parent,” said study co-author and pain researcher Rebecca Pillai Riddell.

“Our findings support the notion that holding a newborn baby against your skin is important to their development,” added Pillai Riddell, a professor in the department of psychology at York University in Toronto.

Image credit: Getty

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Covid-19: English lockdown may last beyond 2 Dec, says Gove

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Stricter rules to start on Thursday will need to bring the R rate “below 1”, the cabinet minister says.

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Starting NaNoWriMo

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NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) begins today, and this is the first year I’m participating. Shortly after posting this, I’m kicking off a 30-day challenge to write at least 50,000 words of a novel this month, which works out to 1667 words per day.

Here’s how I’m framing it: I’ve never written a novel before, and I’ve always wanted to. It’s something I want to add to my life resumé. While I could do this entirely on my own, it’s more fun and engaging to ride along with the energy of NaNoWriMo. I’ve thought about doing this for many past Novembers, and the year of COVID seems like the perfect year to start.

I’ve never written a novel before, so I don’t actually know how to do it. I haven’t written short stories either. Great! It will be a learning and growth experience then. That’s reason enough to do it.

I can also share what I learn along the way since I’m still going to be blogging every day this year anyway.

Here’s something I just learned last month.

There are three basic approaches for writing a novel:

Plotter/Planner – Map out as much of your story as you can before you begin. At least know the key beats of your story, the main characters, and how you’re going to end the story. Some plotters will have every scene planned out ahead of time. J.K. Rowling is a famous plotter.

Pantser – Write by the seat of your pants, making up the story as you go along. You may have no clue what the plot turns and scenes will be or where you’ll end up. Start with a basic idea, just start writing, and see what happens.

A famous pantser is Stephen King. I recently listened to the audiobook version of On Writing (read by him personally) where he talks about his writing style. He likes to begin with a situation and one or more characters, and then he see what happens as he writes. Getting into the minds of his characters helps him figure out what they’ll do in each situation, and his characters often surprise him.

Plantser – This is a mix of plotter and pantser. Do some advance planning, and also take advantage of pantsing mode. Of course there’s a whole spectrum here, so a plantser may lean closer to plotter or to pantser.

My intention for this novel-writing experience is to use plantsing. I figure that plotting and pantsing are tools, so I might as well give myself access to both.

A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t know what type of book I’d write. Since then I’ve loosely mapped out a sci-fi story, a few characters, a theme, some of the world, and some plot turns. I’ve set up a Scrivener project to keep everything organized nicely, much like I would for creating a new course.

Last weekend I wrote a 3000-word summary of my story from start to finish. That summary is very loose though with multiple options for what could happen along the way. I have a sense of how I’ll end the story, but I’m also giving myself a lot of flexibility to make things up as I go.

One the nonfiction side I’ve used all of these approaches. Almost every blog post I’ve written pantsing style. I don’t outline. I just begin with a loose idea, and then I write off the cuff from start to finish and see what flows out. Immediately afterwards I do an editing pass to tighten things up and potentially add more structure or clarification.

For my book Personal Development for Smart People, I used plotting. I mapped out all of the key ideas chapter by chapter with dozens of sticky notes before I started writing. I must say that I didn’t enjoy the writing process as much though. With everything mapped out so tightly, there wasn’t much room for enjoying the flow of inspiration, so the writing felt very mental.

For the courses (Deep Abundance Integration, Submersion, and Stature), I used a form of co-creative plantsing. Each individual lesson was mapped out before recording, but the overall structure and topics were based on going with the flow of inspiration and feedback along the way. This was my favorite approach – a great mix of structure and flow. And people who’ve gone through the courses seem to like the results as well.

Co-creatively plantsing a fiction novel could be a lot of fun, but it also adds complexity, not to mention more time for all the feedback. So I’m not using that approach for NaNoWriMo. I want to dive into the solo novel-writing experience first to see what that’s like.

One tip I found helpful is to remember that the first draft is just for the writer. No one else has to see it. So the first draft could turn out very ugly. You’re just writing the story for yourself, figuring out where the story and characters want to go. Afterwards you can use what you learn from this draft and do a round of plotting, such as by mapping out all of your scenes, before writing a second draft.

I’m approaching this NaNoWriMo experience like an exploration. I’m not attached to how the story turns out, and the basic planning I’ve done thus far is just to serve as a loose guide, like picking a topic for a blog post. So each day I’m just going to dive in and write to see what flows through. I may not even write scenes in linear order.

Many people participate in NaNoWriMo and write stories only for themselves, never publishing what they write. That isn’t my intention though. I’d like to create a story to share, not just write one for myself. This month is just to get a first draft done though, so don’t expect a completed novel to read until sometime in 2021 at the earliest.

Okay… time for some breakfast and then some writing. 🙂

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NHS ‘refuses’ medical cannabis for children with epilepsy

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Families foot the bill as the NHS “refuses” to prescribe medical cannabis for children with epilepsy.

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Covid: What will the England lockdown achieve?

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Lockdown is the measure nobody wanted but now many European countries have decided they need.

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Covid-19: PM announces four-week England lockdown

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Boris Johnson says the country must act to prevent a “medical and moral disaster” for the NHS.

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Health24.com | Newborns of moms with Covid-19 face little infection risk – study

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  • It has been suggested that babies of Covid-19-infected mothers be separated from their mothers
  • It may, however, not be necessary as pregnant mothers with Covid-19 tend not to infect their babies
  • A new study, therefore, recommends normal breastfeeding, while taking a few extra precautions 

In some reassuring news on the front, a new study finds that pregnant women with Covid-19 rarely infect their newborn.

That finding suggests that it may not be necessary to separate infected mothers from their infants and that moms can continue to breastfeed, the researchers added.

“Our findings should reassure expectant mothers with Covid-19 that basic infection-control measures during and after childbirth, such as wearing a mask and engaging in breast and hand hygiene when holding or breastfeeding a baby, protected newborns from infection in this series,” said researcher Dr Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman. She’s a professor of women’s health in obstetrics and gynaecology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, in New York City.

A few extra precautions

For the study, the team looked at 101 newborns born to Covid-19-positive mothers from 13 March to 24 April, 2020.

Hospital personnel maintained basic precautions to prevent infection and kept infants in protective cribs six-feet away from the mothers’ beds. Direct breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact with babies, however, were encouraged, as long as moms wore masks and washed hands and breasts with soap and water.

“During the pandemic, we continued to do what we normally do to promote bonding and development in healthy newborns, while taking a few extra precautions to minimise the risk of exposure to the virus,” Gyamfi-Bannerman said.

Among the infants, only two tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and they had no symptoms. The researchers couldn’t be sure how the babies became infected.

Conflicting recommendations

Several groups have recommended that babies of Covid-19-infected mothers should be separated from their mothers, the study authors noted in a university news release.

“These recommendations were made in the absence of data on rates of mother-to-newborn SARS-CoV-2 transmission and are based on experience with mother-newborn transmission of other infectious diseases,” explained researcher Dr Dani Dumitriu, an assistant professor of paediatrics in psychiatry at Columbia.

“But some of the recommendations conflict with what we know about the developmental benefits of early breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact,” Dumitriu added. “Our study shows that these measures may not be necessary for healthy newborns with Covid-positive moms.”

The findings were published online on 12 October in JAMA Pediatrics.

Image credit: Getty Images

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Covid: When will it be over and we can do this again?

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Christmas? Spring? A return to life as we knew it could be quite a long way off.

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My 2020 Election Prediction

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Here’s my prediction for the U.S. election, which is just 4 days away… and also some predictions for what I think will happen in the months after that.

I expect that Biden is going to win by a landslide and that it’s not even going to be close.

Yes, Trump and the Republicans will continue doing their best to suppress the vote, especially in the swing states, but I don’t think it’s going to make enough of a difference to change the election outcome. The fact that they’re doing this at such an unprecedented scale is a sign of incredible desperation. Even with such overt attempts to cheat, I don’t think those efforts will be nearly enough to tilt the election away from a massive Biden win. If anything I think that stooping so low is backfiring by riling up even more people to vote for Biden – and to vote earlier than they otherwise would have.

It’s understandable that after the 2016 election, a lot of people are feeling trepidatious, like they’re still suffering from PTSD after having endured four years of such monumental stupidity and insanity. People don’t want to get their hopes up this time till they know the outcome for sure. They’re wondering if the polls that show a massive Biden lead are accurate enough to be trusted this time.

Sometimes when you bet on a 90% likely outcome, that nasty 10% comes up now and then. I think one issue with this election is that many people regard the 90% likely outcome as decent and okay but more about relief than genuine excitement, whereas that 10% probability leads to a really dark, scary, and violent place. So that 10% draws a lot of attention because of how awful it is. People really want to avoid that pit of despair.

It’s like spinning a roulette wheel where one of the slots on the wheel results in the loss of a finger. Even if all of the remaining slots represent modest wins or losses, you’re likely to be fixated on that one horrendous potential outcome, even though it’s very unlikely to happen on a single spin.

I’m not entirely sure if a Biden victory will become clear on election night this time, but I anticipate that some news outlets will call a Biden victory on election night. I think that when a Biden victory is initially declared though, many people are going to want more certainty and reassurance about that outcome. People will wonder if it’s really true. So I also expect that it will probably take 48-72 hours before there’s a real social consensus around Biden’s victory. Then I think there’s going to be a lot of celebrating.

I also predict that afterwards it will be a bit messy. Trump will predictably behave like a whiny sore loser. He’ll cry foul and will resort to more dirty tricks, and conspiracy theories will circulate. But I also think there will be a strong enough pushback against that sort of nonsense to keep it well-contained and limited in scope. I expect that enough people are going to put their foot down on this one and not allow things to backslide into what we’ve had to deal with for the past four years. Too many people are really eager for a transition, and I think they’ll band together to prevent a backslide once the election outcome is clear enough.

I also think that resistance from Trump’s own party will limit what he can do after he’s lost. I think fewer people will be willing to play the role of enabler for him. We’re already seeing signs of that now. So that’s going to limit his options. He’ll be able to rile people up on social media as usual, but I don’t think he’ll get enough traction to do what it would take to stop himself from being steamrolled out of office.

I don’t think it’s going to make enough of a difference what Trump does after the election. People already expect him to behave like he’s always been behaving – badly – and so they’ll tolerate a few more months of that nonsense until January, after which they’ll absolutely refuse to tolerate any more of it. So I expect that Biden will take office in January.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing a big revolution or a ton of violence between now and January. There may be some isolated incidents after Trump loses, but I think it will be very limited in scope, nothing close to a national uprising (even if Trump tries to label it as such).

If Trump goes totally off the deep-end, and I wouldn’t discount that possibility, I think he’ll run into serious headwinds with both mainstream and social media resisting those efforts. While those outlets may benefit from stirring up some fear and social outrage, an all-out revolution isn’t in their interests, and being seen as enabling or promoting violence isn’t good for their brands, so I think we can expect the media to act out of self-interest in this case and crack down on anything like that hard and fast. So even if Trump tries to incite his supporters into violence, I don’t think he’ll get far with that approach. He’s too boxed in by strong counter-forces that ought to keep him in check. The media will let him do some damage as long as it’s entertaining and keeps generating clicks and views, but not so much that it creates a crazy-high level of risk for them.

Biden will have his work cut out for him, and I think that due to the coronavirus situation, people aren’t going to want him to wait to start turning things around. So I anticipate that by mid-November, people will already be looking to Biden to start seriously leading in whatever ways he can. I think people will be treating him as our de facto President well before he actually takes office, marginalizing Trump more and more. For starters it wouldn’t surprise me if Biden and Fauci start doing joint press conferences together by the end of the year, sharing how they’re already working cooperatively on the coronavirus situation. And I think Biden would be smart to do that.

After the 2016 election, Obama made an effort to transition gracefully, including inviting Trump to the White House, where Obama welcomed him and showed him around. I don’t expect Trump to do this for Biden. I expect that Trump will cry foul and whine about the outcome and keep spinning up more lies and promoting conspiracies, even long after January. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Trump to leave office graciously.

Even after leaving office, Trump will retain his big social media following, so we can expect him to continue being an online menace. It wouldn’t surprise me if he continues playing the role of conspiracy promoter for many more years. I also think that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook will take increasing flak for tolerating his lies once he’s no longer President. I don’t think they’ll ban him outright, but I’d expect stronger warnings and more post deletions at the very least. I don’t think they’ll want Trump dragging down their brands too much, but they’ll also want to retain access to all the traffic and ad revenue he generates.

I think Trump may have a harder time getting on Fox News once he’s no longer President. Despite their enabling his nonsense for so long, I think they’ll eventually tire of him after he’s out of office, not wanting to keep associating with him if they don’t have to. I think they’ll opt to engage in some brand reconstruction starting in 2021, and I think that will involve moving away from being so closely linked with Trump. It would be a stretch to call them a legitimate news outlet, but I think they’ll try to re-brand themselves closer to center, so they don’t have to keep being as ridiculous as they’ve been in recent years. It wouldn’t surprise me if they already have such a plan in place right now.

I think that in 2021, people will largely relate to Biden with hope, compassion, and a cooperative spirit – except Trump supporters who will just keep behaving as nutters do. Reasonable people know that Biden is inheriting an absolute mess that isn’t his fault, and I think they’ll cut him a lot of slack for the first six months at least. He can hardly do worse than 2020, so just about any modestly intelligent behavior – and the lack of insanity – will go a long way towards generating social support for his efforts. People will demand a lot from him, but even if he did nothing, that alone would be an improvement, so I don’t think he has a very high bar to clear to make 2021 better than 2020.

I think many people are going to be delighted to remember what it’s like like to see honesty and human decency from a President. That will be such a refreshing change.

I think Biden will be good at uniting people around the great challenges we face, even as Trump will continue trying to stir up trouble. Long after Biden takes office, I expect that Trump will serve as an ongoing drag coefficient, actively trying to undermine Biden’s efforts. Even so, I think the years ahead will be optimistic and hopeful ones as we collectively deal with many struggles. We have a lot on our plates, and we know it won’t be easy.

I think that at least through 2021, many people will be so relieved and grateful that Trump is no longer President, and they’ll be glad to face the big challenges of life with rationality and sanity at the level of national leadership instead of stupidity, insanity, and daily lying.

So that’s my overall prediction for what I think is coming up. Let’s see how accurate this is. 🙂

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Covid spreading faster in England than ‘worst-case scenario’, documents show

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Infection levels in England are about four times higher than the government’s worst-case winter plan.

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