Procrastination, Laziness, And Modern Society

While procrastination, like most human behaviors, is certainly nothing new, there is something seemingly “modern” about it. In a fast-paced and complex society in which people are doing far more than the bare minimum to get by, holding off on our various responsibilities definitely stands out: there are tests to study for, jobs to work, errands to run, things to pay, and so on.

People have always been busy of course, as day-to-day survival obviously takes work. But nowadays we’re bombarded with a lot more than gathering food or firewood. Modern civilization is complex, and even recreational and leisurely activities are daunting in their variety and sense of necessity.

To be sure, I’m not lamenting the fact that we have more opportunities than ever for entertainment, comfort, and the like — for the most part, that’s a good thing. Nor am I suggesting that we go back to the seemingly simpler times of tribal, hunter-gatherer existence. It’s just that every era brings with it new challenges and concerns, and every progressive development, no matter how positive in many respects, has certain caveats.

For example, there’s been much discussion about the so-called “tyranny of choice,” in which our minds our overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options and stimuli available, and subsequently we become more tired, indecisive, stressed out, and even depressed.

But to go back to the original point, what does this have to do with procrastination? Well, all these demands have raised the bar of what society expects from us, such that (in America at least) a strong work ethic is seen as a paramount quality. One’s social and personal worth is dependent on one’s socioeconomic status, and that in turn is still widely seen as deriving from hard work and personal responsibility. Those who are regarded as lazy procrastinators are anticipated to be failures in life; conversely, “failures” —  e.g. those who are poor or fail to conform to the standards of our materialistic consumer society — have their shortcomings attributed to laziness.

Now, setting aside the complex and systemic reasons why hard work no longer seems to promote upward mobility like it once did, something needs to be set straight: procrastination is not laziness, and the strong desire to put a pause on life and relax is not evidence of self-entitlement, poor work ethic, or some sort of moral decay. There are good reasons to be “lazy” and deep psychological and social motivations that need to be considered…starting with understanding the distinction between procrastination and laziness.

David Cain of Thought Catalog wrote an excellent piece that explains this phenomenon perfectly. While I encourage you to read the article in its entirety, the following excerpt is what stood out most for me:

It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Certainly, the above reasons don’t apply to every case, nor should we excuse genuine laziness. There are many other theories and explanations regarding the psychology origins of procrastination  But this is something to consider, and it definitely applies to a large number of people (if not everyone at some point).

Ultimately, the difference between laziness and procrastination seems to come down to the motivations and thought processes that guide the former: procrastinators tend to be artists, writers, or others who feel they have better things to do with their time — things that, unfortunately, don’t provide an income and/or may not be respectable. The same reasoning may apply to, say, athletes or the vocationally-inclined, who have no interest in academic pursuits — in grades, tests, and industrial-style education — but who excel at doing what they love, even if it’s central to their overall curriculum (if measured at all).

For those who fear the next step — particularly those with anxiety — procrastination can be their only respite. In this fast-paced world, I can see the temptation for people to, in essence, put a pause on life. Society has changed so much and so quickly, even within the short lifetimes of the young. It can be overwhelming to conform to these social norms that nobody individually seems to like or choose, yet everyone feels pressured to follow (this in turn leads to a whole other sociological tangent about the nature of society and such).

I’m anticipating that people will react to skepticism at this argument, namely that it gives an excuse to laziness. But I think it’s important to see the distinction as far as the reasons, and to consider what the implications are.

There is a lot of evidence that sleeplessness, stress, and depression are growing problems in our society; that young people, especially, are in for a raw deal as far as longer work hours, lower pay, and higher costs of living; and that people with relatively more idle times on their hands are starting to reach existential crises much earlier in life (anecdotally-speaking, I’ve seen a number of teenagers already begin questioning the purpose of their lives, acknowledge the primacy of death, and muse about other hard “adult” concerns — although I’m told this may not be anything new, just more noticeable).

With these trends, one has to wonder whether procrastination will become some sort of widespread characteristic of modern society. Will the stresses and pressures of civilization lead more and of us to shut down, pursue escapism, and otherwise come into conflict with the wider world around us? What do you think?

I’d weigh in further but, ironically, I’m procrastinating at work as we speak by writing this post…

Mental and Physical Health

When you’re betrayed, dumped by a partner, bullied, or otherwise emotionally hurt by another human being, it apparently activates the same areas of the brain that are triggered by physical pain. Indeed, notice the use of physical words like “hurt” or “heartbroken” to describe these circumstances; there is something intuitive about linking negative emotions with physical pain.

Conversely, when someone says or does something nice to you — especially when it involves physical touch like hugs or kisses — it triggers hormones (such as oxytocin)  that promote happiness, trust, and optimism. Think back to when someone did something kind for you, even if it was trivial. Recall the sense of warmth and comfort, or the subsequent boost in positive thinking.

The relationship between mental well-being and overall physical health is deeper than we realize, and should not be seen as entirely distinct. This is especially important to keep in mind given that the former is often seen as less important (or less “real”) than the latter. If you’re unhealthy or feeling ill, you’re mood is likely to be poor. Similarly, someone who is chronically stressed, ostracized, or belittled is going to behave very much like someone who is physically sick — he or she will be lethargic, unenthusiastic, or otherwise feel “off” in some way (the individual may also cope through physically damaging behavior such as alcoholism, drug abuse, or self-harm).

Thus, there is no barrier or clear demarcation between the mind and the body. It may seem like an obvious statement to make, but I’ve seen far too many people (myself included at one point) treat mental health as something of separate and lesser importance. The human mind — with all its feelings, thoughts, emotions, sense of self, and so on — is the product of a physical brain; that brain — like any organ — can be damaged, diseased, or subject to external influences. Mental illness is very much a real thing, and one cannot just “get over it” any more than one can “get over” cancer or grievous wound.

Now, I’m delving into a different matter, which concerns the skepticism and underestimation people apply towards mental illness. But whether we’re discussing a broken heart of clinical depression, my overall point is simple: how we feel is just as impactful towards our overall well-being as physical conditions. Mental and physical health overlap and interconnect in many ways, and the two domains cannot, and should not, be separated. Time constraints don’t permit me to go deeper into this, but I think I’ve offered enough to consider.

Yet another experiment showing that conscious "decisions" are made unconsciously, and in advance

Reblogged from Why Evolution Is True:

• 

In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some "conscious decisions" are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them:  brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision.  The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we're conscious of having made a "choice", that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain. 

Read more… 1,652 more words

What do you guys think? Does this experiment disprove the existence of free will?

The Workings of the Adolescent Brain

As neurology, psychology, and other social scientific disciplines advance and mature – namely through the help of new technology – we’re learning and more about the elusive workings of our own mind.

With that knowledge comes – albeit in fits and starts – an improved ability to work with one another and with ourselves. Once we realize that much of our behavior is shaped by forces beyond our control, we learn to appreciate the nuances and complexities of human nature. We learn that evil, ignorance, fallibility, hypocrisy, and other negative traits have at least some basis in our biology – thus we must confront them from a scientific framework that acknowledges their innateness and treats them as conditions to be understood and treated, rather than simply stamped out or punishment.

This is why I try to have patience with people, be they children, teens, elders, or adults. It’s hard to accept sometimes, but there are clearly certain deterministic biological factors that make some of our behaviors inevitable. This doesn’t mean we should excuse or accept such behavior, but rather that we must around it and adapt to it while the person (hopefully) grows out of it with time and experience. It’s easier said than done, but we were all there once, and responding negatively hardly helps matter — although research suggests that arguing with teens can ultimately be fruitful for their development in the long-term. Maybe we’re just supposed to go through the motions rather than try to fix everything.

Reflection on Atheist Identity

The label “atheist” is so odious and stigmatized that even many atheists themselves shun it (admittedly, myself included sometimes). Interestingly, most national polls report a higher number of people who “don’t believe in God” than people who explicitly identify as “atheists” (usually by a margin of 2 to 1). The position of non-belief is less disquieting to the irreligious than the term used to describe it – the quaint result of generations of demonization, condemnation, and prejudice. The negative connotation of atheism is so pervasive across the public consciousness that not even the godless themselves can shake it off and be at ease with it.

Rats, Sperm Whales, and Altrusim

The following report comes from Discovery News, and while it’s a bit old, I think its relevance and implications remain secure.

Researchers started by housing 30 rats together in pairs, each duo sharing the same cage for two weeks. Then, they moved them to a new cage where one rat was held in a restraining device while the other could roam free.

The free rat could see and hear his (or her — six of the rats were female) trapped buddy, and appeared more agitated while the entrapment was going on.

The door to the trapping enclosure was not easy to open, but most rats figured it out within three to seven days. Once they knew how, they went straight to the door to open it every time they were put in the cage.

To test the rats’ true bond to their cagemates, researchers also ran the experiment with toys in the restraint to see if the rats would free the fake stuffed rats like they did their comrades. They did not.

“We are not training these rats in any way,” said first author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal.

“These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal. We’re not showing them how to open the door, they don’t get any previous exposure on opening the door, and it’s hard to open the door. But they keep trying and trying, and it eventually works.”

Even when researchers rearranged the experiment so that the trapped rat would be set free into another enclosure, away from his hero friend, the rats still opened the door, indicating they were not motivated by companionship.

“There was no other reason to take this action, except to terminate the distress of the trapped rats,” Bartal said. “In the rat model world, seeing the same behavior repeated over and over basically means that this action is rewarding to the rat.”

This sort of behavior is perhaps unexpected, give that most people would hardly think of rats (mere pests that they are) as being capable of much sentience, let alone selflessness. Not only does this challenge  the notion that altruism is the sole purview of advanced cognitive capacity, but it goes against the popular perception that living things are concerned only with their own self-interest and survival.

There’s clearly nothing to gain from freeing another rat, other than the apparent “satisfaction” of alleviating the suffering of another living thing.  But is there a limit to this behavior? What would the rats do if given a more enticing alternative to freeing their comrade?

In one final test to truly measure the resolve of the rats, scientists presented them with a pile of chocolate chips in the cage. The rats were not hungry, and in prior experiments showed they liked chocolate because they would eat it instead of rat chow given the chance.

Still, free rats tended to act benevolently. Even if they munched on a few chips first, they would then free their pal and allow him to eat the remaining chips.

“It said to us that essentially helping their cagemate is on a par with chocolate. He can hog the entire chocolate stash if he want(s) to, and he does not. We were shocked,” said co-author Peggy Mason, a professor of neurobiology.

So even when given an irresistible temptation to spurn their friend, the rats still tended to prioritize the well-being of the other rat. In fact, they furthermore shared in the goodies, even though they could easily hog them after having done their part.

Rats are hardly the only animals to demonstrate this sort of behavior. Just about every social species that’s been studied – from dolphins to monkeys – have displayed similar behavior. Most recently there was a discovery that a group of sperm whales,  a species widely perceived as aggressive, had adopted a deformed dolphin.

Behavioral ecologists Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause discovered this unique phenomenon when they set out to observe sperm whales off the island of Pico in the Azores in 2011. Upon arriving there, they discovered a whale group of adult sperm whales, several whale calves, and an adult male bottlenose dolphin. Over the next eight days, the pair observed the dolphin with the whales six more times, socializing and even nuzzling and rubbing members of the group. At times, the sperm whales seemed merely to tolerate the dolphin’s affection, while at others, they reciprocated. “It really looked like they had accepted the dolphin for whatever reason,” Wilson reports to ScienceNOW. “They were being very sociable.”

This gregarious dolphin was easily recognizable by its spinal malformation, a rare spinal curvature that gave the dolphin’s back half an “S” shape. This malformation did not seem to affect the dolphin’s overall health, but  was likely the reason that the dolphin joined up with the sperm whales in the first place. In the highly social and clique-based world of dolphins, such a disfigurement could have given the dolphin low social status, or may have prevented the dolphin from fitting in and keeping up with its peers. “Sometimes some individuals can be picked on,” Wilson says. “It might be that this individual didn’t fit in, so to speak, with its original group.” The deformed dolphin could perhaps better keep up with the sperm whales, which swim more slowly, and could stay by their side at all times, as sperm whales always assign a “babysitter” to remain at the surface with the calves while the other adults dive deep to feed.

Could there be anything in it for the sperm whales? It’s possible there is a mutual benefit, as the article notes towards the end. Why else would they accept the member of another species into their cohesive group, let alone one that has “disabilities”?

While there are several likely possibilities for the dolphin’s advantage in the match, the whales’ reason for the adoption is less clear — there is no obvious advantage that the whales could gain by adding the dolphin to their group. Sperm whales have never been seen being affectionate to other species, and, further, scientists say that bottlenose dolphins and sperm whales often do not get along, as the dolphins have been known to chase and harass the whales and their calves.

Of course, there are some caveats to keep in mind. For starters, it’s still uncertain what the sperm whales’ motivations are, and as tempting as it is to view it as an act of compassion, it’s simply too soon too tell. Then there’s the fact that this is an isolated incident, and can hardly be extrapolated to represent the norm.

Still, this and the previous rat experiment suggests that there is something innate within other social species that seems to cause what we would otherwise call altruistic or compassionate behavior. This is definitely something that should be studied more, if only to give animals more credit for sentience, and thus more rights.

In any case, it makes sense that social species would have some innate inclination to help one of their own, since our individual survival is dependent on the group’s well-being. We depend on each other’s cooperation to thrive, so generosity is often a win-win for everyone. Maybe even altruism, which requires personal sacrifice, may confer some sort of advantage. Regardless,  I this suggests that morality does indeed have some natural origin, given that empathy and a sense of solidarity seems to underpin most moral actions.

Thoughts?

 

The Perks of Shyness: Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS)

Never heard of it? Well if you’re the shy, introverted type, you have most likely experienced it.

It’s a personality trait characterized by sensitivity to any kind of stimuli. Basically, people with SPS have an above-average ability to notice subtleties in their environment: they’re better at reading people, or noticing minute details in their surrounds. Studies have found that SPS and other closely related personality traits – such as behavioral inhibition and introversion – are correlated with greater awareness of subtle stimuli (including social and emotional cues that most people otherwise don’t notice), giving more attention to things, and greater sensory reaction times. Indeed, MRI tests have revealed that the brains belonging to people with SPS showed far greater than normal activity in high-order visual processing.

And while you may feel glum about being so shy, individuals with SPS have typically reported having richer, more complex inner lives than others – which makes sense, given that shy people, by definition, spend much of their time looking inward and reflecting. In essence, the shy person is substituting their social life with their own rich inner life: philosophizing, reading, exploring, and enriching themselves in their own way (which isn’t to say that being extroverted is bad, as it’s merely another approach to enriching one’s life).

So take this into consideration the next time you’re lamenting your shyness, as I often have (although I have my extroverted moments as well). Obviously, this information may be little consolation to those of you are particularly tormented by the social ramification of shyness, but it doesn’t hurt to keep it in mind. You may not realize it, but you’re social inhibitions are something to be proud of, especially if you make the most of them. 

Can you relate?

Rationally Religious

Jared Diamond, a polymath with a number of professions and specialists, has written a new piece in Salon about religion titled “Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious.” It’s an excerpt from his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, which I haven’t yet read, but certainly plan to (his most well-known book, and the one that introduced me to him, was Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies).

Diamond, who is an atheist that regards religion as mere superstition, nonetheless raises some fair academic questions about the origins and character of religion – namely, why do religious beliefs take the particular form that they do, and why do they seem so compelling to the majority of the human species?

It’s a question I often ask myself as well, given the universal prevalence of religion even to this day (albeit a prevalence that is both waning and altering in its character). I know that religious people aren’t simply stupid or crazy (at least not all of them, though that could be said of many secularists as well), and that like most human phenomena, there are complex reasons for it.

Diamond’s conclusion, which others have postulated as well, is that religion serves a sociological and psychological purpose: it is a form of bonding through group solidarity, a way of maintaining community and cooperation, which are vital to our survival as a social species.

The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but who really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.

That’s why religious affiliation involves so many overt displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.

One thing to add is that such rituals and norms won’t bond you to your group unless 1) you believe that others genuinely believe them and 2) you also sincerely believe.  There’s no genuine sense of bonding if you follow these rituals simply to conform to the social and religious norms around you.

Accounts from “closet atheists” – among whom are clergy – reveal that they continue to publicly conform to these beliefs largely to avoid being ostracized (or worse), but no longer feel any sincere sense of connection or solidarity. Similarly, people will often drop out of their congregation, if not abandon organized religion entirely, largely because they perceive their coreligionists to insincere, due to demonstrations of hypocrisy or duplicity.

Perhaps this also explains (partly at least) why heretics, apostates, blasphemers, and others who don’t toe the religious line are are usually met with repression or even death: they undermine the social cohesion that is so vital for maintaining order (or consolidating the power of ruling elites, whose relationship with organized religion was close, if not intertwined).

Obviously, this religiously-based social cohesion can have beneficial results as well, especially in helping to respond to individual or community tragedies. Religion’s help to maintain the institutional and organizational framework that helps facilitate everything from charity or even job searches (indeed, in many small towns and communities, the church is the center of cultural, political, and economic life). This is why many atheists nonetheless see religions as practical, or at the very least acceptable, even if they don’t agree with them. Of course, the potential for abuse is always there, as history has shown time and again.

Anyway, Diamond goes on to note another key reason for religion’s potency:

Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. . . Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.

This reminds me of surveys (none of which I could locate at the moment) that asked individuals the reasons they “found” religion after having previously been secular. In most instances, they cited emotional or psychological factors: a traumatic experience, a purported miracle, the need for a sense of purpose or longing, and so on. Indeed, I’ve encountered such motivations through my many engagements with religious believers of all persuasions.

It reminds me of the correlation between high rates of religiosity in a given society, and a higher prevalence of crime, poverty, violence, and other socioeconomic ills. If one looks at the majority of the world’s most prosperous and stable nations, they are relatively more secular than the global average; conversely, nearly all of the world’s most impoverished and politically troubled countries demonstrate higher rates of piety.

This pattern can be seen in the US as well, with the deeply religious states of the “Bible Belt” typically recording far higher rates of crime, poverty, and so on than the more secular states of the Northeast and Northwest. Basically, the parts of the world in which people have less to worry about – in terms of money, civil liberties, personal safety – tend to be less religious. Secularism (and to a lesser extent atheism) rises in conjunction with individual and societal prosperity. There are exceptions of course, and this is merely a trend, not an iron rule. But it’s something to consider.

Obviously, the reasons for human social dysfunction (like that of all of our behavior) are very complex, but this relationship between piety and one’s socioeconomic or psychological conditions – both individually and socially – suggests that religion’s serve some sort of practical role as a source of comfort, purpose, and community (the last of which also gives us comfort). This also helps to explain why religion is so universal in our species, and why religions often alter in conjunction with economic and political developments (for example, more organized and politically developed civilizations tend to have more organized religions).

On a more personal level, this explains why my atheism was more comforting following my adoption of a secular humanist framework. Atheism in itself offers little to nothing to work with – it’s merely the absence of religion, and to have no religion is one thing, but to have no purpose or guiding principles is another. Embracing secular ethics and guidelines – and the growing community of those who share them – has served as my substitute to supernatural religion. It’s not for everyone, but it suits me just fine.

Rate this:

The “end of history illusion” describes an almost universal phenomenon among human beings, in which we have a tendency to see the present time as the stopping point for any change of in lives. Once we reach a certain age, we essentially assume that from then on we’ll remain the same. It’s a little difficult to describe given that the “present” tense of time slides as we age. But the New York Times has a great article on it:

When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, a team of psychologists said Thursday, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions.

They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” According to their research, which involved more than 19,000 people ages 18 to 68, the illusion persists from teenage years into retirement.

“Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Trying to explain this tendency yields even more interesting considerations. After all, if people acknowledge how much they’ve changed over the years, why can’t they seem to realize that such change will continue?

People seemed to be much better at recalling their former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

Why? Dr. Gilbert and his collaborators, Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, had a few theories, starting with the well-documented tendency of people to overestimate their own wonderfulness.

“Believing that we just reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good,” Dr. Quoidbach said. “The ‘I wish that I knew then what I know now’ experience might give us a sense of satisfaction and meaning, whereas realizing how transient our preferences and values are might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.”

Or maybe the explanation has more to do with mental energy: predicting the future requires more work than simply recalling the past. “People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself,” the authors wrote in Science.

But it’s false comfort, as this mentality does have its caveats:

The phenomenon does have its downsides, the authors said. For instance, people make decisions in their youth — about getting a tattoo, say, or a choice of spouse — that they sometimes come to regret.

I think it comes down to the nature of the human mind. Our brains are limited in their capacity to look into the future. Our senses and perceptions are shaped by the here and the now, not by a hypothetical future that is far and away – and therefore difficult to grasp, let alone feel concerned about. Try as we might, we’re just too cognitively limited.

Research Highlights the Negative Health Effects of Verbal Abuse

I’ve long argued that verbal abuse, contrary to popular belief, can in some ways be as psychologically harmful as the physical kind. As high-functioning and emotional creatures who are fundamentally shaped by our social relations and environment, we can suffer terribly from this kind of mistreatment. It affects us in profound ways that can’t simply be resolved by “toughening up” or “getting over it” – that’s as effective as telling a victim of physical abuse to simply run away or fight back. Even if they were to do so, the damage from the violence will remain. Crippling mental afflictions PTSD usually occur even those who’s violence was defensive or just.

Now, an excellent piece in Patheos by Dan Ficke cites new research that has confirmed what many people already experience: that children who are mistreated in any way, even through verbal taunts, can eventually develop physical problems in their brain. The study, referenced from Psychology Today, notes the following:

Verbal abuse from peers during the middle school years had the greatest impact, presumably because this is a sensitive period when these brain connections are developing and becoming insulated with myelin. (Myelin is formed by non-neuronal cells, brain cells that are also known as “the other brain”, or glia.)

The environment that children are raised in molds not only their mind, but also their brain. This is something many long suspected, but now we have scientific instruments that show us how dramatically childhood experience alters the physical structure of the brain, and how sensitive we are as children to these environmental effects. Words–verbal harassment–from peers (and, as a previous study from these researchers showed, verbal abuse from a child’s parents) can cause far more than emotional harm.

Ficke adds much more to this study through his own personal and rational observations, so I highly recommend you read his musings. There’s not much more I can add that hasn’t already been eloquently stated by him.

The typical “solution” for the victim of abuse is to either cope with the subsequent anguish through unhealthy means (drugs, self-harm, etc) or, most commonly, to take their anger and self-loathing out on others. Known as displaced aggression, this shifting of abusive behavior is a sort of pay-it -forward approach to violence – as you were treated badly, so too will you treat others badly, and that person will in turn abuse others, and so on. It’s a horrific and vicious cycle – one notably observed among other primates as well – that is worsened by poverty, inequality, and other psychological stressors that manifest through abuse.