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QUESTION 1 Being Young, Active and Physically Fit May Be Very…
QUESTION 1
Being Young, Active and Physically Fit May Be Very Good for Your Brain
Physically fit young adults have healthier white matter in their brains and better thinking skills than young people who are out of shape.
Physically fit young adults have healthier white matter in their brains and better thinking skills than young people who are out of shape, according to a large-scale new study of the links between aerobic fitness and brain health. The findings suggest that even when people are youthful and presumably at the peak of their mental prowess, fitness or the lack of it may influence how well their brains and minds work.
We already have plenty of tantalizing evidence that aerobic fitness can beneficently shape our brains and cognition. In animal experiments, mice and rats that run on wheels or treadmills produce far more new neurons in their brains than sedentary animals and perform better on tests of rodent intelligence and memory. Similarly, studies involving people show strong relationships between being physically active or fit and having greater brain volume and stronger thinking abilities than people with low fitness or who rarely exercise.
But most of these past studies focused on middle-aged or older adults, whose brains often are starting to sputter and contract with age. For them, fitness and exercise are believed to help slow any decline, keeping brain tissue and function relatively youthful. Much less has been known about whether fitness likewise might be related to the structure and function of healthy, younger people’s brains.
So, for the new study, which was published last month in Scientific Reports, scientists at the University of Münster in Germany decided to look inside the skulls of a large group of young adults.
They began by turning to a hefty trove of data gathered as part of the Human Connectome Project, an international collaborative effort that aims to help map much of the human brain and tease out how it works.
As part of that project, more than 1,200 young men and women in the United States recently agreed to have their brains scanned with a specialized type of M.R.I. that looks at the health of their brains’ white matter. White matter consists of the many connections between neurons and brain regions. It is, essentially, the brain’s communications wiring. (The working neurons make up the brain’s gray matter.)
The volunteers, who mostly were in their 20s, also completed multiple questionnaires about their health and lives, a general medical checkup, and a two-minute walk test, a widely used measurement of aerobic fitness that involves walking as rapidly as possible for two minutes, to see how far you get.
Finally, they sat through a battery of cognitive tests, designed to quantify how well they could reason and remember in various ways.
The German researchers then gathered all of this information and began crosschecking it, comparing the young people’s fitness and thinking skills, their fitness and white matter health, and their white matter health and ability to think.
And they found a variety of interesting correlations. The young people, all of whom were healthy, had covered a wide range of distances in their two-minute walks. Some of those young men and women covered far less distance than others, marking them as the least physically fit.
These relatively out-of-shape young people generally performed worst on the tests of memory and thinking skills, the scientists found. Their brain scans also indicated that their white matter was slightly weaker and more frayed than in the brains of the young men and women who had walked farthest in those two minutes.
These relationships remained intact when the researchers controlled for the young people’s body mass indexes, socioeconomic status, age, gender, blood sugar levels and blood pressures.
In essence, the fitter people in this group were, the more robust their white matter looked, and the better they performed on tests of memory and thinking skills.
The researchers were taken aback by the strength of the associations between the young adults’ fitness, thinking and white-matter health, says Dr. Jonathan Repple, a psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher at the University of Münster who oversaw the new study.
“There already are a few studies published looking at older people” and their brains and fitness, he says, “but to observe this in a young sample was quite surprising.”
This study provides only a snapshot of one moment in the lives of these young people, though, and can show only links between their fitness, white matter and thinking skills. It cannot prove that greater fitness directly caused their brains to look and function better.
And they found a variety of interesting correlations. The young people, all of whom were healthy, had covered a wide range of distances in their two-minute walks. Some of those young men and women covered far less distance than others, marking them as the least physically fit.
These relatively out-of-shape young people generally performed worst on the tests of memory and thinking skills, the scientists found. Their brain scans also indicated that their white matter was slightly weaker and more frayed than in the brains of the young men and women who had walked farthest in those two minutes.
These relationships remained intact when the researchers controlled for the young people’s body mass indexes, socioeconomic status, age, gender, blood sugar levels and blood pressures.
In essence, the fitter people in this group were, the more robust their white matter looked, and the better they performed on tests of memory and thinking skills.
The researchers were taken aback by the strength of the associations between the young adults’ fitness, thinking and white-matter health, says Dr. Jonathan Repple, a psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher at the University of Münster who oversaw the new study.
“There already are a few studies published looking at older people” and their brains and fitness, he says, “but to observe this in a young sample was quite surprising.”
This study provides only a snapshot of one moment in the lives of these young people, though, and can show only links between their fitness, white matter and thinking skills. It cannot prove that greater fitness directly caused their brains to look and function better.
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Question 1 What is the title ofthe article? Question 2 List three
main conclusions ofthe article. Question 3 Are the ideas
presented in the article viable? Question 4 How can th…
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QUESTION 2
It’s a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood, and That’s O.K.
Fred Rogers’s belief that we should validate emotions, not suppress them, is wisdom for all ages.
On the 51st anniversary of the first taping of the classic children’s show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Google published an animated “doodle” commemorating him. It depicts Mister Rogers walking through the neighborhood interacting with a variety of people, including a small child with his head hung low. Rogers fashions a paper airplane for the boy, which instantly cheers him up. People commonly caricature Mister Rogers this way a gentle man intent on making everyone happy but that may be more a reflection of America’s discomfort with dark emotions than of the man himself. The last thing Fred Rogers would do for a sad boy is distract him from his sadness.
Anyone who watched “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” would know that the host considered all feelings natural including the dark ones and believed they don’t need fixing. Many of the children raised watching the program are now parents, and a new appreciation for Fred Rogers has blossomed thanks to the 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and the new feature film “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers. Today, Rogers’s philosophy of difficult emotions stands a chance of being heard and heeded.
As a child I preferred the frenetic energy of “Sesame Street” to the dull pace of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but that changed when I had children of my own and wondered how to raise them thoughtfully without depriving them of television. In my classroom, I regularly teach Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in which he raises a critical eyebrow at attempts to put serious discourse on television, and especially at shows like “Sesame Street” that label themselves as “educational.” Mr. Postman implies that slow and even boring shows stand a better chance of teaching children important lessons than fast-paced, loud ones.
My memory of that boring show made me curious to see whether it offered anything valuable. It did, and so began my awakening to Rogers. With (and sometimes without) my children, I’ve watched hundreds of episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” over the last seven years. I’ve read everything written by and about Fred Rogers and seen all the footage I could find. I saw the 2018 documentary once in the theater and then went back again to take notes. I went into “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” skeptical, since it’s much easier to get him wrong than right and it’s critical that we get Fred Rogers right but I kept my fingers crossed. The film’s emotional depth surprised me; in direct contrast to the Google doodle, it thoroughly conveys his philosophy of difficult emotions. It makes sense: the cast and crew had to study Rogers to make the film, which is what’s required to accurately represent the man, to animate the caricature.
Despite his sweet pastor’s demeanor, Rogers was tuned into our souls’ darkest feelings. He had an uncommon appreciation for anger, fear, stress, sadness, disappointment and loneliness. He respected the range of emotions and encouraged children to accept all their feelings as natural. This conviction came early: As the only child to proper New England parents (until his sister was adopted when he was 11 years old), Rogers was discouraged from acknowledging sadness. This, along with his childhood experience of getting bullied for being overweight, made “Fat Freddy,” as he was called, acutely aware that too often, and usually inadvertently, adults silence children instead of showing them how to deal with troubling feelings.
Rogers believed that variations of the “sticks-and-stones” adages intended to get kids to “shake it off” are stifling; they abandon children to their pain instead of teaching them how to process it. In contrast, Rogers encouraged children to face their dark feelings. Not a trained philosopher, Rogers would likely attribute his education in the emotional landscape of children to the psychologist Margaret McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh, with whom he collaborated for 30 years. And yet there is a foundation for the sort of philosophy of feelings that Fred Rogers practiced that can be traced back more than 2,000 years to ancient Greece.
In the “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle described our souls as being made up of feelings, predispositions and active conditions. Our predispositions name our go-to emotions, those we feel most often in response to certain stimuli. Some people are prone to sadness, others to anger, and the occasional few to genuine cheerfulness. Our feelings, like twigs, catch a spark every time we brush past life’s embers, but ignite only when they get stoked by our predispositions. Two individuals responding differently to the same event getting fired, for example Aristotle would attribute to their differing predispositions.
I am predisposed to anger, which played better in New York where I grew up than in South Texas where I now live, and yet it humanizes me to students. Those who share my predisposition relax their shoulders when I tell them they’re not alone, and they laugh when I say I’m jealous of people who cry easily instead of wanting to punch somebody.
Feelings and predispositions matter, for Aristotle, but more for the sake of self-knowledge than self-improvement. It’s helpful to know which feelings I am predisposed to as well as what I am feeling at any given moment, but these two categories are much harder to budge than the third. Aristotle described active conditions as “how we bear ourselves” in the face of our feelings. As a believer in right action, Aristotle suggested that we train our souls to react beautifully to an ugly mess. He was implying that we not fret too much over our troublesome feelings or stubborn predispositions.
Indeed, Aristotle would discourage us from shaming ourselves over feeling sad when we “should” feel happy. He rejected “shoulds” altogether when it came to feelings, since he believed them to be natural and, without accompanying wrong action, harmless. All feelings, for Aristotle, are potentially useful in that they provide an opportunity to practice behaving well. Feelings alone can’t jeopardize virtue, he believed, but actions can and often do. Mister Rogers agreed: “Everyone has lots of ways of feeling. And all of those feelings are fine. It’s what we do with our feelings that matter in this life.”
Rogers believed that all children (and adults) get sad, mad, lonely, anxious and frustrated and he used television to model what to do with these difficult and often strong emotions. He wanted to counter the harmful message kids typically receive, some version of the ever-unhelpful you shouldn’t feel that way.
In one episode, when he couldn’t get a flashlight to work, Mister Rogers expressed frustration in front of the camera: He admitted feeling disappointed at the fact that the trick that he had wanted to show his viewers didn’t work. In doing so, he validated his disappointment and showed his audience that talking about it helps. One of Rogers’ core beliefs was “what’s mentionable is manageable,” and he considered an urgent lesson for kids to learn to name their pain. Rogers believed that if children were encouraged to talk about feelings instead of being shamed for them, they could get to work finding appropriate outlets. One of Rogers’ recurrent lessons was on anger. Inspired by a child who asked him a question about anger, he wrote a song about it:
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong …
And nothing you do seems very right?
This song was Rogers’ way of teaching kids how to be angry, instead of how not to be angry. The first step is for the child to recognize their anger as well as their temptation to bite, hit, kick. The second step the song suggests is to find appropriate outlets for that anger:
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you go?
Playing the piano as a child, Rogers wrote, taught him to express the whole range of his feelings. He recounts banging on the low keys when he got mad, and I imagine him exploring the minor keys when he felt sad. In multiple episodes, Rogers showed viewers how to tell their feelings through the piano. When he had famous musicians like Yo-Yo Ma or Wynton Marsalis on the program, Rogers would ask whether they played differently when they were sad or angry. They always reported that yes, they did, and that playing their darker emotions helped.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was purportedly a show for children. But I think Rogers also meant it for adults. We’d be better off if we’d stop negating children’s dark emotions with stifling commands like “Don’t cry,” “Calm down,” “Be quiet.” If we are convinced by Rogers’ and Aristotle’s claim that feelings are not wrong and that “what’s mentionable is manageable,” we should begin mentioning our own sad, lonely and disappointed feelings. In doing so, we would show children and our grown-up selves how to appropriately manage them.
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Question 1 What is the title ofthe article”? Question 2 List three
main conclusions ofthe article. Question 3 Are the ideas
presented in the article Viable? Question 4 Hon.r can t…
Show more
Hello, please Can you please read the articles and respond to these two question
Thank you.
