Friday, June 24, 2011

Fracking Trolls

The brother of a FB friend posted this Wired article about City Living rewiring our brains.  The results referenced a different study about the area of the brain that was affected in this study that linked it to mental illness and based on social stress in 70 people the studies (really low test group) of German college kids (a very specific demographic) the broadly speculated that

“Taken together, the findings suggest that the cingulate–amygdala circuit is one on which genetic and environmental risks for mental illness may converge,” 
or in short hand people that are stressed out by being perceived to be failing at a specific task in an MRI machine while we where watching and providing negative social feed back are likely prone to mental illness.

In the comment thread on this one of the commenters pointed out this gem from the text
"After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness."
and went on to insinuate that it would explain why most Democrats live in the city.

I responded
"I still think that the researchers inferd that or tried to offer explanations on their results, and also pointed out that the active parts of the brain are linked with mental illness. Given the limited amount we actually know about the brain I feel their study did not give them the jumping off point to make these assertions. I think what they did study showed that a group of people that come from the city are stressed out by people perceiving them to fail. They have success anxiety, not mental illness, nor are they on edge about getting mugged or any other bullshit assertions. THESE ARE ASSUMPTIONS, trying to assign reason to the results. Not what the study actually studied. The researcher's bias filters (or the author of the article's bias filter) was not working that day. "
What do you think am I off on this, or is this guy trolling me?

Speaking of trolling, one of the blogs I follow posted this little gem.  Yes it is a Miley Cyrus video, but re-dubbed.  Totally worth the few minutes.

9 comments:

  1. Seems like it. But these days who knows anymore.

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  2. sounds like you are being trolled.

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  3. I hope you're being trolled, otherwise that would be kind of sad :/.
    Funny video too.

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  4. nice interesting post

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  5. Anonymous1:32 PM

    Nice post, can't stand that chick though funny or not

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  6. lol... "tried to sell me hubcaps"...
    i love re-dubbing. a phenomenon i most recently was attune to.

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  7. What is going on in this video, I don't recall seeing it before.

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  8. @braumaman it is the video for Miley Cyrus's song Party in the USA, someone redubbed it using bad lip reading as their muse. If you watch her mouth it looks like she is saying the nonsense they made, really there are a different set of words. The original is linked in the comments on youtube.

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