AMERICANS are a pretty anxious people. Nearly one in five of us — 18 percent — has an anxiety disorder. We spend over $2 billion a year on anti-anxiety medications. College students are often described as more stressed than ever before. There are many explanations for these nerves: a bad job market, less cohesive communities, the constant self-comparison that is social media. In 2002 the World Mental Health Survey found that Americans were the most anxious people in the 14 countries studied, with more clinically significant levels of anxiety than people in Nigeria, Lebanon and Ukraine.
To be clear, research suggests that anxiety is at least partially temperamental. A recent study of 592 rhesus monkeys found that some of them responded more anxiously than others and that as much as 30 percent of early anxiety may be inherited.
Yet what is inherited is the potential for anxiety, not anxiety itself. Life events obviously play a role. Another, less obvious factor may be the way we think about the mind: as an interior place that demands careful, constant attention.
Humans seem to distinguish between mind and body in all cultures, but the sharp awareness of mind as a possession, distinct from soul and body, comes from the Enlightenment. It was then, in the aftermath of the crisis of religious authority and the scientific revolution, that there were intense debates about the nature of mental events. Between 1600 and 1815, the place where mental stuff happened — the “thing that thinks,” to use Descartes’s phrase — came to seem more and more important, as George Makari, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, explains in his forthcoming book, “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.”
From this, Mr. Makari writes, was developed the psychological mind and psychoanalysis and an expectation that personal thoughts and feelings are the central drivers of human action — not roles, not values, not personal sensation, not God. In the United States, the enormous psychotherapeutic and self-help industry teaches us that we must pay scrupulous attention to inner experience. To succeed and be happy, we are taught, we need to know what we feel.
Not everyone else believes this. Take response to psychiatric illness. Americans believe that excessive sadness makes us sick. Sadness is not the only symptom needed to meet criteria for a diagnosis of depression, but it is the one that characterizes the illness for us. That is not true in many other parts of the world. When the anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman carried out fieldwork in China in 1980, just before its borders were opened to the world, people who met criteria for depression complained mostly of chronic pain. They were often sad, just as those in the United States with depression often experience pain. But in that China, bodily pains — and not inner states — justified seeking care.
Americans think that the primary symptoms of schizophrenia are the quasi-auditory hallucinations that often accompany the disorder. When I interviewed people with schizophrenia who heard voices, they were clear that to hear voices meant that you were crazy. Anthropologists have shown that in other parts of the world, people are more likely to identify inappropriate behavior, rather than hearing voices, as schizophrenia’s primary symptoms, and that invisible voices are not always the mark of madness. A few years ago in southern India, I came to know a woman whose active hallucinations would mark her as very ill on a standard assessment. Yet neither her husband nor her father mentioned her hallucinations as a worry. Her problem, they said, was that she sometimes shouted.
Pixar’s new film “Inside Out” is about an 11-year-old girl forced to move across the country when her father joins a start-up in San Francisco. Riley leaves behind her beloved hockey team. Her new house seems cramped and ugly. She’s lonely, and decides to run away, back to Minnesota.
“Inside Out” tells this story from the point of view of her mind. Five emotions (fear, joy, sadness, disgust and anger) sit at a control panel in the aptly named headquarters. These emotions determine what she does. Anger grabs hold of the controls when her father insists she eat her broccoli. The plot hinges on a tussle between Joy and Sadness (Joy doesn’t want Sadness to touch Riley’s memories) in which the two are accidentally swept out of the control room. They get lost in Riley’s mind, wandering around the subconscious and imagination land (both of which are very large) while Anger is left in charge (a bad idea). In the end, Joy discovers how important sadness is for human connection, and Riley creates a good new life in San Francisco. As the movie ends we see a new, improved and more complex control panel, now with a button marked “puberty.”
It’s a charming movie. It is also distinctly American. It is based on a particular model of the mind that we take for granted, but that is in fact as culturally idiosyncratic as the way we dress. I’m not suggesting that the basic science of emotion depicted in the movie is wrong. Emotions do seem to be crucial in organizing human thinking. I’m suggesting that there is something deeply cultural about the way this mind is imagined, and that it has consequences for the way we experience thoughts and feelings.
Our high anxiety, whatever the challenges we face, is probably one of the consequences.
美国人非常容易焦虑。有近五分之一(18%)的美国人患有焦虑症。我们每年花在抗焦虑药物上的费用达到20亿美元(约合124亿人民币)。经常见到有人说,现在的大学生承受着空前的压力。对于这些焦虑的原因,有很多解释:糟糕的就业市场,社区凝聚力下降,因为使用社交媒体而进行持续的自我比照。2002年,世界心理健康调查(World Mental Health Survey)计划发现,在14个被调查国家中,美国人是最为焦虑的,达到临床显著水平的人群比尼日利亚、黎巴嫩和乌克兰都多。
在所有文化中,人类似乎都会对身心加以相区别,但非常清晰地意识到心灵的存在、把它和灵魂与肉体相区别,是从启蒙运动时期开始。随着宗教权威遭遇挑战和科学革命诞生,当时出现了有关心灵本质的激烈辩论。1600年到1815年间,心智产生的地方——用笛卡尔的话说就是那个“会思考的东西”——似乎变得越来越重要。就像精神病医生和精神分析学家乔治·马卡里(George Makari)在其即将出版的著作《心灵机器:现代心智的诞生》(Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind)中所描述的。
现在两层楼的single family house设计,为了节能和制冷高效,采用双中央空调。但以前的房子大都是单中央空调设计。
更早些年建的房子(如1980年前后建的),室内排风管/抽风管设计不合理,会造成中央空调制冷效果差。
我女儿8年级Science fair的选题正好是关于这个,题目为:Ventilation in Action
我电脑里正好有她写的ppt,贴一段
Background Information
Hot air rises and cool air sinks based on their densities. This is a big problem when it comes to summer time, especially in
houses built before the 1980’s with only one air conditioning unit, because the second floor stays warm for a long period
of time even with the air conditioner on.
This problem can be solved in 3 ways:
- Installing another AC unit on the second floor (costly)
OR using either:
- Circulation Design: Ventilation design where cold air is supplied from the AC unit and warm air is extracted from the top floor.
- Recirculation Design: Circulation design where inside air is extracted, sent to the AC unit, and supplied back into the air conditioned space.
( easy to install and costs less) 作者: pp_dream 时间: 2015-7-29 22:18 标题: Reality is Stranger than Fiction!
It's said "reality is stranger than fiction", and truly it is!