Despite repeated calls from public health groups to cut smoking scenes on the silver screen, the number of “tobacco incidents” in PG-13 movies has risen by 120% over the past decade, a new report finds.
Much of the rise has occurred within a certain genre of film: biographical dramas. But even in these “biopics”, characters aren’t necessarily smoking because they represent a historical figure who smoked in real life.
New statistics
Instead, “73% of characters who used tobacco in these biographical dramas were fictional”, noted a team led by Michael Tynan, a researcher with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health.
Trends like these are important, Tynan and colleagues said, because “the Surgeon General has concluded that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in movies and initiation of smoking among young persons”.
The new statistics also run counter to recommendations from public health groups – the most notable being that the Motion Picture Association of America should slap an R rating on a movie that shows a character smoking, “unless it portrays an actual historical figure who used tobacco or depicts the negative effects of tobacco”.
There was a bit of good news from the new report, which relied on a University of California, San Francisco database tracking onscreen tobacco use in top-grossing films.
That data showed there has been a notable decline in the use of tobacco in fictional movies aimed at the young.
Tougher measures needed
“Tobacco incidents in PG-13 fictional movies declined 57%,” the study authors wrote, “from 511 in 2010 to an all-time low of 221 in 2018”.
However, a 233% rise in tobacco use during the same time in PG-13 biopic movies has “negated previous progress made in reducing tobacco incidents in youth-rated fictional movies,” the researchers pointed out.
Two experts in curbing youth smoking agreed that the movie industry has been slow to change, and tougher measures may be needed.
“Rating films with an R may prevent youth from seeing the tobacco depictions and would provide the opportunity for movie studios to reduce tobacco incidents in their films,” contends Pat Folan. She directs the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health in Great Neck, New York.
And Dr Len Horovitz, a lung specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, wondered about another nicotine-driven scourge affecting US teens.
Some progress
“Although the study doesn’t address vaping, this practice is also epidemic,” he said. “The depiction of smoking as glamorous in movies that young people watch may be responsible for the audience emulating on-screen behaviour.”
There has been some progress made in Hollywood to curb depictions of smoking in films, Tynan and his team noted. But deeds speak louder than words, they added.
“All major motion picture companies have policies to reduce tobacco depictions in youth-rated movies; however, Disney and Viacom were the only companies with no tobacco use in youth-rated movies in 2018,” the report said.
The findings were published in the CDC journal Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.
Many people think of their brain as an overstuffed attic. Every square-inch is either crammed with information or working overtime to help the body function properly. So, is it even conceivable that a person be normal with just half a brain?
Yes, apparently it is, according to a new analysis that assessed brain health among six adults who had undergone a hemispherectomy as children. The highly invasive surgery, which entails removal or severing of half the brain, had been part of a paediatric epilepsy treatment to reduce seizure risk.
“The people with hemispherectomies that we studied were remarkably high-functioning,” study author Dorit Kliemann said in a statement. “They have intact language skills. When I put them in the [brain] scanner, we made small talk, just like the hundreds of other individuals I have scanned,” she explained.
“You can almost forget their condition when you meet them for the first time,” added Kliemann, who is a post-doctoral scholar in cognitive neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena.
Kliemann and her team noted that the six patients in the study had all struggled with relentless epileptic seizures from a very early age, with one patient initially struck by seizures just minutes after birth.
Bringing epilepsy under control
Hemispherectomies are typically performed as a means to bring such “intractable” epilepsy under control, the team explained. The aim is to isolate whichever half (or hemisphere) of the brain is affected by the disease. That can mean either actual removal of the problematic half of the brain or a cutting off of all physical connections between the two halves.
All of the patients had undergone full removal of half their brain. The youngest patient was just 3 months old at the time of surgery, while the oldest had been 11. Four involved excision of the right side of the brain, while two had the left side removed.
Now in their 20s and 30s, the six patients agreed to undergo functional MRI brain scans while awake at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.
Running comparisons
Brain activity was tracked in areas tasked with regulating vision, movement, emotion and thought processes.
Results were then stacked up against those of six healthy adults who also underwent scans, and with data previously collected on nearly 1 500 healthy adults (average age of 22).
Because brain networks devoted to a single regulatory function often span both hemispheres of the brain, the team expected to see weaker neural activity among the hemispherectomy patients. That was not the case.
In fact, scans revealed normal in-network communication and activity function. And communication running between different regulatory networks was actually found to be stronger than normal among hemispherectomy patients.
The findings were published online in the journal Cell Reports.
Degrees of compensation
Dr Joseph Sirven, a professor of neurology with the Mayo Clinic in Florida and editor-in-chief of Epilepsy.com, said the findings did not strike him as entirely surprising. He said he often sees patients functioning at a very high level post-hemispherectomy.
“But what surprises me is the degree of compensation that was noted,” added Sirven, who was not part of the study team.
“And if we could figure out the way that the brain compensates in this dramatic setting, and harness this compensatory mechanism for patients affected by stroke, traumatic brain injury or other conditions, that would be a very big deal,” Sirven noted.
That thought was echoed by Kliemann. “As remarkable as it is that there are individuals who can live with half a brain, sometimes a very small brain lesion – like a stroke or a traumatic brain injury or a tumor – can have devastating effects,” she noted.
That is why it’s so important to get a better understanding of exactly how the brains of hemispherectomy patients managed to reorganise and compensate for the loss of half a brain, Kliemann said. Because doing so could eventually lead to new “targeted intervention strategies” to help other types of patients struggling with the debilitating effects of a variety of brain injuries, she theorised.
University of Cincinnati geography researchers have identified a tipping point for deforestation that leads to rapid forest loss.
Geography professor Tomasz Stepinski used high-resolution satellite images from the European Space Agency to study landscapes in 9-kilometer-wide blocks across every inch of the planet between 1992 and 2015. He found that deforestation occurs comparatively slowly in these blocks until about half of the forest is gone. Then the remaining forest disappears very quickly.
The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Stepinski and former UC postdoctoral researcher Jakub Nowosad, the lead author, discovered something surprising and fundamental: nature abhors mixed landscapes, at least on a scale of 81 square kilometers. The study showed that mixed landscapes (like agriculture and forest) are comparatively few and, more surprisingly, do not stay mixed for long. These mixed blocks tend to become homogeneous over time, regardless of the landscape type.
“I think it’s very intuitive. It corresponds to the different climatic zones. The Earth before people was certainly like that. You had forests and mountains and wetlands and deserts,” Stepinski said. “You would expect people would create more fragmentation, but as it turns out, people never stop. They convert the entire block on a large scale.”
Stepinski said landscapes are always changing through natural or anthropological causes. Human causes are both direct, like clear-cutting, or indirect like climate change.
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Last year, Stepinski used the same data to demonstrate that 22% of the Earth’s habitable surface was altered in measurable ways between 1992 and 2015. The biggest change: forest to agriculture.
For the new study, Stepinski examined nearly 1.8 million blocks covering Earth’s seven continents. Blocks were categorized by 64 landscape combinations. Researchers observed transitions in these blocks from predominantly one type to predominantly another in nearly 15% of the blocks between 1992 and 2015.
“The data we have covers 23 years. That’s a relatively short period of time. But from that we can calculate change in the future,” Stepinski said.
Deforestation was the most pronounced example of human-caused landscape change, researchers found. They used probability modeling known as Monte Carlo methods to determine the likelihood of different types of landscape change over time (in this case hundreds of years).
The result? Researchers found that the most likely trajectory of change was from one homogeneous type to another.
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“Planet Earth wants to be homogeneous. The land wants to be the same in all these patches. And when they start to change, they don’t stop until they convert everything into another homogeneous block,” he said.
The authors did not examine why blocks change so quickly once a transition begins. But Stepinski said it’s possible that development such as logging roads or drainage required to clear forest makes continued change that much easier.
“I can only speculate because that was not part of the study, but I would imagine two things are happening,” he said. “If you are cutting forest, you have the infrastructure to finish it. It’s so much easier to cut the rest. Second, the forest is more vulnerable to change when there has been a disturbance.”
Wildlife managers often try to preserve larger intact blocks to prevent fragmentation, said Martin McCallister, the Appalachian Forest project manager for the Edge of Appalachia Nature Preserve in southern Ohio. The preserve is managed by the Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s largest wildlife conservation organizations.
“You’d be hard pressed to find land managers who wouldn’t be strongly in favor of protecting larger tracts because they’re more resilient to a variety of challenges, including invasive species and climate change,” McCallister said. “Once a property gets fragmented by roads, it’s easier to extract resources. It’s also easier for invasive species and pests to get a foothold.”
McCallister said woodlands can be fragmented on paper, too.
“In Ohio, 96 percent of our woodland owners have less than 50 acres. They represent a lot of small parcels,” he said.
The UC study found that mixed land types don’t stay mixed for long.
“I think it is interesting that this property applies both to natural and human landscapes,” said co-author Nowosad, a former UC postdoctoral researcher who now works as an assistant professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland.
Nowosad said the study provides a data-driven model of long-term landscape change. While researchers only looked at changes between forest and agriculture, Nowosad said it would be worthwhile to examine whether tipping points exist for other landscape transitions.
“This model can be used to help understand how landscapes evolved and are going to evolve in the future,” Nowosad said.
Stepinski, a physicist who worked for NASA before coming to UC, said the principle borrows from other disciplines, particularly astrophysics.
“If you look at the evolution of stars, the principle is you predict a long-term path statistically from short-term knowledge,” Stepinski said. “It’s an idea that has been used elsewhere but never for environmental study.”
While it’s only a theory, it’s one that could be borne out by time, he said.
“It’s thought-provoking. My hope is that people will criticize it and come up with different ideas,” Stepinski said.
Exercise may do more than build body strength: New research shows it might also keep brain cells in shape.
According to the study, exercise helps maintain the brain’s gray matter, which is linked to various skills and thinking abilities. So, keeping your gray matter intact may help prevent thinking declines, the German researchers explained.
The report was published online in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Improving cognitive function
“This [study] provides indirect evidence that aerobic exercise can have a positive impact on cognitive function in addition to physical conditioning,” said Dr. Ronald Petersen, a Mayo Clinic neurologist.
“Another important feature of the study is that these results may apply to older adults, as well. There is good evidence for the value of exercise in midlife, but it is encouraging that there can be positive effects on the brain in later life as well,” said Petersen, who co-authored an editorial that accompanied the report.
Exercise and brain scans
The German researchers, led by Katharina Wittfeld, followed more than 2 000 adults in northeastern Germany from 1997 through 2012. Over the study period, fitness was measured and participants underwent MRI brain scans.
Although the study found an association between exercise and brain health, it couldn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
According to Mayo Clinic experts, moderate and regular exercise – about 150 minutes per week – is recommended. Good fitness also involves:
I just finished 14 days of daily blogging (15 if we include this post), publishing an article called Sculpting Your Character 7 minutes before midnight last night. That was fun piece to write. 🙂
The commitment of this one-year daily blogging challenge is energizing and motivating. And my writing is becoming faster, easier, and more flowing.
Previously I’d prefer to blog in the morning. I love the early morning hours and like to get up around 5am. But with the current Stature course launch happening (2 days left to go), my blogging time has shifted to later in the day sometimes, like starting at 9 or 10 pm or even later. I’d normally go to bed between 10-10:30pm, so that’s very late for me. Previously it would be highly unusual for me to write that late in the day.
Now two weeks into this challenge, I’m liking the flow of it so far. With the launch happening, I’m only getting 4-5 hours of sleep per night this week, but somehow I still feel energized. I am looking forward to when the launch is over since I haven’t had a day off since… I can’t even remember, but it was before Christmas. The best I’ve had since then has been a light day of only 10 hours of work. I am looking forward to making it through the final two days of the launch, so my schedule can become a bit more relaxed.
I often tell myself that I’ll just write a shorter piece this time, maybe 1000 words or so, and then go to bed. But then as I start writing, I feel increasingly inspired and engaged. Writing is fun and energizing, especially when I write in a playful way like last night’s 2700-word article, which flowed very easily. I started out tired but felt energized by the time I hit the publish button.
Sending Energy
It feels like people are sending me energy whenever they read my work. There’s always a surge of readers when a new article first gets published, perhaps since many people subscribe to my blog via email or RSS. I’m most sensitive to this energy during the first hour after I publish something new since that’s when the greatest number of people are reading it. If I publish late in the day, and people’s reactions are positive and energizing like they were last night, I can’t go to sleep right away because I don’t feel tired anymore. Hence my bedtimes have shifted till 1-2 am lately.
Clicking the publish button is like downing a double shot of espresso, not because I’m nervous about people’s potential reactions, but because the energy that flows through very shortly afterwards is usually very loving, enthusiastic, and happy.
I also notice major differences in the energy patterns based on the tone with which I write. If I feel nervous it’s because I wrote something that made people feel insecure. I’m becoming increasingly aligned with expressing caring and connection through my creative work, partly because the energetic feedback feels a lot better to me. If I share something that makes people feel bad about themselves, they transmit those feelings to me, and I’m soon feeling what they’re feeling, although in my case it’s more of an aggregate summation of many frequencies of energy, which isn’t always harmonious. Maybe it’s a form of writer’s karma. It’s very noticeable.
I realize that some people aren’t into the notion that we can somehow transmit energy and emotion to each other at a distance. I’m convinced it’s real though because it just happens so much, the sensations are so pronounced, and I’ve received (and continue to receive) ample validation that we’re energetically synching up. Plus I find it to be an empowering perspective, and I get better results from thinking this way.
On many of our Conscious Growth Club coaching calls, I’ll sometimes feel a surprisingly strong burst of energy or emotion that I can tell isn’t originating from me. I’ll often ask which person on the call just got triggered by the last sentence or phase I said, and someone (often multiple people) chime in to validate that what I was sensing was coming from them. As anyone can verify from the recordings, this also happened on the Deep Abundance Integration calls more than once.
It doesn’t matter if the other person is 10 timezones away. The feedback happens just as quickly at a distance, so apparently the planet doesn’t block such signals.
Honoring the Endless Creative Flow
I love being sensitive to people’s energy and emotional feedback because I think it’s part of the same channel that gives me an endless flow of ideas to write about. I think that because I write so much, this channel sends me more good ideas than most people because I honor the intentions of this energy flow, which is to share and broadcast the ideas and not keep them bottled up in my mind.
I never get writer’s block. I feel like there’s always beautiful waves of inspiration flowing towards me, and I can tune into these waves anytime, anywhere, whenever I want, and I’ll be gifted with new creative ideas to express through any medium I like. I believe this privilege is bestowed upon me because I honor this flow. I’m loyal to it, I cherish it, and I serve it well, even when it yanks me out of bed before dawn to get up and write.
This flow is very real-time, so it’s always best if I act on it immediately. This morning I woke up with an inspired idea for a new article called “Are You Bored with Your Character?” I told my wife who is not a space alien that I was getting up to write such a piece right away, even though I’d only had about 4.5 hours sleep. But then when I got downstairs, I felt like checking on some launch stats and the latest feedback to see how that was going. And then I realized I was hungry, so I had breakfast. That only delayed me an hour or so, but I sensed that the energy transmission for the original article idea was falling out of sync. I had waited a little too long, and I knew that if I tried to write it, it would be more difficult. There was a different idea coming through for writing at this present time. And that’s this article.
When I’m at my best and really in the flow of inspiration, I won’t write the same article at 8am than I would have written at 6am. Even if I’m certain of what I’m going to write about at 6am, if I wait a few hours, I know it’s best to tune in and pick up a fresh idea that’s appropriate for that new time. Ideas have a time signature, and they’re super sensitive to delay. When I postpone an idea, it may revisit me again, usually in an altered form, but much of the time it’s gone forever, never to return with the same inspiration. Only the mental shadow of the idea lingers once that initial wave of energy is left, and there’s little or no joy in trying to create from lifeless shadows (shadow puppetry excluded).
If you get an inspired idea, I recommend that you act on it immediately – as in the very same minute. Don’t wait. Don’t delay, not even by an hour. The energy is there, but it won’t stick around for long. The universe is offering you a tremendous gift. Open it!
If you delay then you slam that gift back in its face, and it will remember that slight. It will divert that beautiful and life-enhancing flow of ideas to someone else… perhaps someone like me who will act immediately.
Does Your Muse Trust You?
I’m not perfect about this of course, but I do take action consistently enough that my muse knows it can trust me. Does your muse trust you, or have you betrayed it so much that it has pretty much abandoned you? Don’t disrespect your muse – unless you want to spend the rest of your life barely squeaking by and always having to do boring or tedious work just to make ends meet. That’s on you. Your dance partner deserves better.
If your muse has abandoned you, it’s never too late to repair that relationship. Ask for an inspired idea today, and then act immediately when it shows up. Prove that you’ll honor this energy, and it will dance with you. Screw it over by getting stuck in your head and second-guessing yourself, and it will abandon you. The gifts that were meant for you will flow to someone else.
There’s more than enough of this creative energy flow for all of us, more than you could ever exhaust in a lifetime. This energy knows no scarcity. It can flood you with abundance across all areas of life if you’ll simply dance with it.
Dance playfully. Dance fearlessly. Dance fiercely. Sometimes slow-dance to “Careless Whisper.”
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It may feel awkward at first, but if you just keep showing up, you will get better and better at it. And that’s when dancing with this energy becomes life’s true delight.
Aligned Intentions
This energy is super sensitive to aligned intentions. If your intention is based on neediness, it won’t be kind to you. But if your intention stems from love, caring, creative expression, growth, expansion, contribution, and other energy signatures that light you up inside, then you can dance, dance, dance.
I love how the daily blogging challenge has enhanced and improved my relationship with this energy channel. It’s become louder and clearer. I think it recognizes the strength of my commitment on some level. It doesn’t just feed me endless ideas. It also feeds me energy, so that while I’m writing, I’m bestowed the energy to cross the finish line. Even if I’m tired when I start, I feel awake and alive when I’m done. It’s just like dancing. You can start out tired, but once you get moving and loosen up a bit, it can be fun and energizing.
I anticipated that something like this might happen when I began this challenge, but it’s even more delicious than I expected. I feel like this channel of inspired energy and I are dancing together like never before. Instead of wondering how I’ll make it another 360 days, I have this sense of knowing that because of this long-form dance, this is going to be the most beautiful year of my life so far.
Every day I’m also getting more emails from people, expressing gratitude and appreciation for the recent articles. A few have said that they’ve been reading my blog for 10+ years, and this is this is the first time they’ve sent me any kind of feedback ever, but they felt inspired by a recent piece to finally reach out and connect. I’m genuinely touched by that. I too can tell that something has shifted in a really beautiful direction this year.
I’m not the only one experiencing this type of shift. We’re seeing this energy being stirred up in many Conscious Growth Club members, and I’m seeing it in some friends who are amping up their creative output this year too – such beautiful ripples.
In the past I used to think I could only use this flow of inspiration for short-form content, but with practice and experimentation, I’ve learned to use it for long-form content, such as our courses. That was trickier than I thought due to my own limiting beliefs about how it would be different from short-form content, but I finally got out my way, and now I know how to do the long-form dance too, which is immensely rewarding on a whole new level. I’m pouring this same kind of inspired energy into creating Stature, which is now up to 147 sign-ups… make that 148 since another one came in just as I was typing this. I’m sure a lot more will join today or tomorrow to get the launch discount.
Let’s dance! 💃🕺
P.S. Here’s a fun sync… I actually started playing “Careless Whisper” on YouTube when I first posted the link to it above. YouTube continued streaming a couple more songs after that automatically as YouTube normally does, and just as I typed “Let’s Dance!” to close out this article, the song “Lady in Red” started playing – a song about dancing.
If you enjoy applying Subjective Reality interpretations to songs as we covered in lesson 9 of Submersion (“Listen to Reality”), maybe try interpreting the lyrics from “Lady in Red” to see if they have any special meaning for you right now. For me this was just beautiful, so I’m gonna listen to it again right after I post this.
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For some reason that song often makes me wanna cry. 😭
