Topics for Apr 24

[Charlie.]

1. First Section – Ice Breaking & Discussion (19:00 ~ 20:20)

What Doctors Don't Tell You (But Should)

Have you ever wondered what your doctor was thinking as you sat in your paper robe on the exam table? Or worried that you're not taking full advantage of those precious few minutes you have with her? As a doctor myself (I'm a general internist in New York City), I'm fascinated by the relationship between physicians and patients, and I am convinced that a deeper understanding of what's going on beneath the surface can benefit all parties involved. Here's what doctors like me would love you to know so you can get the most out of your time with us—and enjoy the best health possible.

1. Pick two or three top goals for your visit
Patients often come to my office with a list of 30 things they want to talk about, but it's just not realistic to cover everything under the sun in one visit. And I'm guilty, too: I may want to cram in every vaccination, blood test and pearl of dietary advice I can, while my patient has something else entirely on her mind. Making a list in advance is always helpful, but be sure to prioritize. You might even make clear at the beginning of the visit: "There are two things I want to make sure we talk about today."

On the flip side, do allow time for the doctor to address her top concerns. You can even ask her what they are. She might have something surprising to discuss—like a concerning blood test result, or a new medical recommendation for women your age—that's worth listening to.

2. Don't blow off yearly checkups
You might have read about the recent study showing that physicals don't yield head-over-heels benefits—patients who dutifully get them do not seem to be healthier or live longer. (They do, however, come out with more diagnoses and more possibly harmful tests—see No. 3.) Still, I feel that touching base in an annual or biennial visit is probably the most important way that doctors can keep tabs on how you are doing. When your physician takes a complete medical history, this is her chance to pick up subtle clues about impending illness—like changes in your sleep, energy levels or bowel habits—even if you may feel perfectly well.

The relationship you build with your doctor through repeated visits becomes especially helpful if and when illness does arrive. Carmen Martinez (not her real name) has been my patient for more than 15 years. One day, she came to my office saying she felt slower than usual. She answered "no" to the standard questions about chest pain and shortness of breath. Her physical exam wasn't much different from what it normally was. But she was insistent about the slowness.

This wasn't like the Ms. Martinez that I knew. I decided to order a chest X-ray—and it turned out that she was in the early stages of a heart condition that needed immediate attention. Her presentation hadn't fit the textbook, but I think we were able to catch this disease because we knew each other: She knew me well enough to press a symptom that might seem inconsequential, and I knew her well enough to sense that something was clearly off.



2. Second Section - Discussion & Debate (20:30 ~ 21:50)

Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did. It wasn’t just the 50,000 words you had to master to become fluent or the fact that for the first six years of your life you learned about three new words per day. It was the tenses and the syntax and the entire scaffolding of grammar, not to mention the metaphors and allusions and the almost-but-not-quite synonyms.

But you accomplished it, and good for you. Now imagine doing it two or three times over — becoming bilingual, trilingual or more. The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself. At a bilingualism conference last weekend convened by the Lycée Français de New York, where all students learn in both English and French, language experts gathered to explore where the science stands so far and where it’s heading next (disclosure: my children are LFNY students).

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth — and perhaps even in the womb — to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations language sounds. At first, we don’t much care which of these phonemes from which languages we absorb, which makes sense since the brain has to be ready to learn any of the world’s thousands of languages depending on where we’re born.

“Before 9 months of age, a baby produces a babble made up of hundreds of phonemes from hundreds of languages,” said Elisabeth Cros, a speech therapist with the Ecole Internationale de New York. “Parents will react to the phonemes they recognize from their native tongues, which reinforces the baby’s use of those selected ones.”

Doubling down on a pair of languages rather than just one does take extra work, but it’s work young children are generally not aware they’re doing. Bilingual people of all ages are continually addressing what research psychologist Ellen Bialystok of Toronto’s York University calls the dog-chien dilemma, encountering an object, action or concept and instantaneously toggling between two different words to describe it. Such nimble decisionmaking ought to improve on-the-fly problem solving, and studies show that it does.

 Language researchers often point to the famed Stroop test, which asks subjects to look at the word red, for example, which is presented in an ink of a different color, say blue. Then they are required to say aloud or identify on a computer the ink color. That requires an additional fraction of a second to accomplish than if both the word and ink color were the same. Everyone experiences that lag, but for bilinguals it’s measurably shorter. “Monolinguals always need more time,” Bialystok says. “It’s a lifelong advantage for bilinguals.”

 Excelling on the Stroop test is hardly a marketable skill, but what it suggests about the brain is something else. Sean Lynch, headmaster of the LFNY, previously worked in a multilingual school in France in which all of the students spoke French and at least one of 12 other languages, including Japanese, Russian, Italian and Spanish. As is often the case with well-endowed schools, the students, on average, outperformed their age peers academically, and it’s impossible to determine how much of that is due to native skill and how much to the fact that they simply have access to better teachers, books and other resources. Still, Lynch observed that these students seemed to show a greater facility with skills that relied on interpreting symbolic representations, such as math or music.

Preliminary imaging work suggests that the roots of this behavior may even be visible in the brain. Some studies, for example, have shown a thickening of the cortex in two brain regions — most importantly the left inferior parietal, which helps code for language and gesturing.

Bialystok is not entirely sold on these studies, since she would expect the greatest differences to be in the frontal lobes, where higher functions such as planning, decisionmaking and other aspects of what’s known as executive control take place. Some of her own work has found an increase in white matter — the fatty sheathing that insulates nerves and improves their ability to communicate — in the frontal regions of bilinguals, suggesting denser signaling and complexity of functions in these areas. “Structural differences are where the new science is really unfolding,” she says. “That work will reveal a lot.”

 Not every study out there finds benefits to bilingualism. Earlier this year, psychologists at Concordia University in Montreal studied 168 children ages 1 and 2 years old being raised by bilingual parents. In general, they found that the kids in the younger half of that cohort had smaller comprehension vocabularies — the number of words they appeared to understand — than kids being raised monolingual. The older half of the sample group had smaller production vocabularies — or words they could pronounce. This results, the researches believe, from parents mixing their languages when speaking to their kids, choosing the words they feel the children will have an easier time understanding or reproducing. That in turn leads to what linguists call code-switching — a commingling of tongues by the children that produces what Americans call Spanglish or Franglish when Spanish or French melded with English (this particular study produced more complex comminglings, since it included kids speaking German, Japanese and Farsi as well). However, Bialystok agrees that this is a short-term disadvantage of bilingualism, and says in most cases the kids catch up.

And when they do, language skills acquired early can pay late-life dividends. In one study, bilinguals experienced the onset of age-related dementia 4.1 years later than multilinguals, and full-blown Alzheimer’s 5.1 years later. “One school of thought says that any cognitive reserve — education, multilingualism, even playing Sudoku puzzles — strengthens the brain and helps it resist disease,” says Bialystok. “The other says that the brains of multilinguals experience the same level of disease as those of monolinguals, but they cope with it better. They function at a higher level than they would otherwise be able to function.”

[Charlie.]

Sorry for retard posting..^^

[James. lee]

c u~

[Lively]

오랜만에 참여해요^^

[Sarah24]

참석합니당

[Yooepo]

늦어서 죄송~