Please Explain (The Leonard Lopate Show)

Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, and Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, and tell us what empathy is, how we develop it, what happens when people don’t develop it, and empathy’s role in human psychology, behavior, and relationships.

If you have questions about empathy, leave it as a comment, below!

When we fall asleep, our brains invent incredibly realistic and memorable dreams. Sometimes those dreams are dark and terrifying, making falling asleep something to fear. On this week's Please Explain, we'll find out what goes on inside our brains as we sleep. Dr. Andrew Gerber, a Neuroscientist and Clinician at Columbia University, and David K. Randall, journalist and author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep , explain the neuroscience of dreams and nightmares.

Why do we dream? Do dreams have a purpose? When the brain is asleep it's inundated by impulses and senses and experiences, and the brain puts them together. A necessary function of sleep, especially of REM sleep, is to consolidate the information that was gathered in the previous day and even in the more distant past, into coherent, long-term memories that get stored for later use. That's what dreams are. Dr. Gerber explained that the general scientific theory is that “Every night when we sleep our brains are consolidating what we should remember and letting go what we don’t.”

According to  Dr. William Domhoff, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who collected 50,000 dream logs, most dreams are by and large negative. “People are attacked, people don’t like you, it’s kind of like the worst days of middle school,” said David Randall.

Are dreams and nightmares different? Dreams that have the same basic structure—a narrative, imagery, a plot—have the same kind of neural substrate to them, whether they be positive or negative. When you wake up with a generally bad feeling but not with any recollection of a bad dream, it might mean that you had a dream with a different kind of structure that involved different parts of the brain.

Dr. Matthew Ebben of Weill Cornell Medical College’s Center for Sleep Medicine discusses what normal sleep is and what happens when it gets disrupted by disorders such as insomnia, snoring, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, sleep walking, and narcolepsy. He explains the causes and treatments for sleep problems. Dr. Ebben is Assistant Professor of Psychology in Clinical Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College.

More than 40 million Americans have arthritis, and it's the leading cause of disability for people who are 65 and older. Almost everyone over 70 has some form of arthritis, but it can affect much younger people too. Dr. Clark Smith, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, explains what causes arthritis and how to treat it.

Medical marijuana is legal in 20 states, and is used to treat symptoms of multiple sclerosis, AIDS, side effects of chemotherapy, as well as pain, glaucoma, epilepsy, insomnia, and anxiety. Dr. Igor Grant, Distinguished Professor and Executive Vice-Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD School of Medicine and Director of the UC Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, tells us about his research into the possible utility of cannabis compounds in the amelioration of certain severe manifestations of disease. And Jim Rendon, author of Supercharged: How Outlaws, Hippies, and Scientists Reinvented Marijuana, talks about the changing attitudes toward marijuana and how the increasing acceptance of medical marijuana is changing the legal and commercial landscape.

During the last ice age, glaciers covered the entire northern part of our continent, shaping mountains and carving valleys. Today, most of the earth's glaciers are found in Antarctica and Greenland, but there are glaciers on every continent, including Africa, most commonly above the snow line. Tim Creyts, a glaciologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Earth Institute, Columbia University, explains what glaciers are, how they move and sculpt the landscape, and how climate change is affecting glaciers around the world.

Get up, stand up! Evidence is mounting that sitting for long stretches of time — in a car, at a desk, or on the couch — is bad for our health. A sedentary way of life and spending hours sitting down seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. Dr. James Levine, professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, professor at Arizona State University, and a national leader in obesity research, and Dr. Wayne Stokes, director of Sports Medicine Rehab at NYU Langone Medical Center, explain how sitting causes health problems and what we can do to counteract them.

Research by Dr. Levine and others reveals that  sitting for more than 2 hours a day is directly linked to health problems like obesity, metabolic disorders, increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and high cholesterol. One Australian study showed that adults who watch an average of six hours of television day over their lifetimes will die 4.8 years sooner that adults who don’t sit for hours watching television.  

“It’s rather like having a Ferrari idling for three months. It gets clogged up with grit and oil and sludge, and that kind of sludge is what you’re seeing in the muscle bands,” Levine said. He also said that moving around improves intuitive and creative thinking. “There’s cognitive dulling and we’re just not as smart as we could be” when we sit all day.

Even regular exercise at the gym isn’t enough to counteract the negative effects of sitting at our desks and in front of the television for long stretches. We have to move more and more often. Levine and Stokes recommend using standing desks, even a treadmill desk, or, at the very least, standing or moving every 15 minutes or so while you’re sitting at work — get up to talk on the phone, go talk to colleagues instead of e-mailing them, take short walks and standing breaks. In addition to the metabolic problems caused by inactivity, Stokes points out that sitting leads to slouching and poor posture can cause back and shoulder pain that many people who sit in front of a computer all day experience.

But don't worry if you've been too sedentary — it’s never too late to make changes. “If one embarks on a program of chairlessness, of getting out of the chair and starting to move more,” Levine said, “one can achieve very, very significant improvement.”

On this week's Please Explain. Dr. Philip Muskin, MD is the Chief of Consultation-Liaison for Psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry, described how hypnosis works and whether it can be used it to change or control behavior.

We may think of being hypnotized as zoning out, but in fact, Dr. Muskin says, we’re “in a very focused state of concentration.” That’s because “in hypnosis, you focus yourself to do one thing.”

“Hypnosis is not an abnormal state. It is a completely normal state. We are in trances – every single one of us – every single day.” If you’ve ever found yourself daydreaming in a boring lecture or a long meeting, you’ve put yourself in a kind of trance.

Soldiers in the middle of a firefight can naturally go into a trance to protect themselves and feel less pain.

People vary in their ability to be hypnotized. It’s a bell curve with most of us be in the middle. And, Dr. Muskin notes, “many athletes are much more hypnotizable than they realize.”

Dr. Muskin said that transcendental meditation and other similar kinds of meditation and activities are trance states. “You’re pulling your awareness in, you’re disconnecting…you’re doing this one thing with all of your mental ability.” And there are all sorts of physiologic changes that come along with those states that make us feel pretty good.

A recent long-term study questioning the benefits of annual mammograms for older women. This week’s Please Explain is about breast cancer. Dr. Larry Norton, Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Breast Cancer Programs at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, describes how the disease is detected and the ways it can be treated.

This week’s Please Explain is all about genius. Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, talks about what exceptional intelligence is and how it can influence creativity, leadership and achievement. And we’ll find out how genius and intelligence are measured.