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corboy
Hmmm, that paper by Kopp is no longer available online.
(Smile)
Just make sure, whenever you find something that informative, to always make a copy.
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The Rhetoric of Casino Architecture
Design for Service points out a page on casino design in this archeological history of slot machines (by William Choi and Antoine Sindhu).
Other features of the casino, including the music, carpeting, and even the air conditioning system, are manipulated to the casino’s advantage. Studies have shown that carpeting is often purposefully jarring to the eyes, which draws customers’ gaze upwards toward the machines on the gambling floor. Music is usually mild and soothing, and plays on a continuous loop rather than individual songs, contributing to a trance-like feeling of warmth and comfort in the gamblers. It has even been reported that casinos have attempted to manipulate the air circulation in order to affect the behavior of gamblers. They may add extra oxygen to the circulation to keep gamblers more alert, or even add pheromones that make people feel more relaxed and at ease.
All of which actually points to how common it is for us to be powerfully articulated by design and architecture. They work best by fooling us.
And work they do, all the time and everywhere: Not just in casinos, but shopping malls, grocery stores, sports stadiums, fast food restaurants, clubs passé and trendy are designed in ways that help us forget our surroundings and participate in ways consistent with the goals of the space. Malls without clocks and exterior lights but with food courts, park benches, and piped-in bird songs, like casinos, attempt to take us out of the world and part of an isolated, fully contained environment. Fast food restaurant seating that's not quite comfortable urges us to eat quickly and leave, freeing up space for the next consumer. Crackdowns on loitering and visibly homeless people before high-profile city events like the Olympics or large conventions prevent visitors from seeing what real city life is like.
Sometimes they're designed that way intentionally—particularly when large markets are involved—but sometimes they just get that way in an evolutionary fashion, as different arrangements are tried out over and over again. Those that work get repeated, refined, and dispersed. That's how culture works.
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Here is a reference to an article in Rolling Stone about Amma the Hugging Guru. A disciple was quoted saying she had planned to travel with Amma for six months. She ended up staying six years.
Could it be that so many orienting cues (zeitgebers) were changed by living at the ashram that, cognitively, time slipped away for this person?Quote
"...it is impossible not to be reminded of how the line where devotion blurs into obsession, where faith morphs into fanaticism, can become so thin and porous that you can cross it without ever knowing it.
"When I first started traveling with Amma, I thought it would be, like, six months," a young woman tells me on my second day at the ashram. "That was six years ago." Indeed, I spend three days at the site, a sleepdeprived blur during which time takes on malleable properties.
[www.culteducation.com]
[www.wisegeek.com]
A zeitgeber is an external cue which influences the operations of the internal clock in an organism. The classical example of a zeitgeber is light, which leads some organisms to wake up, while others go to sleep. An interruption in such cues can confuse an organism, potentially causing health problems and functional difficulties, as demonstrated in numerous studies.
The term was coined in 1954 by Jürgen Aschoff, a German biologist who studied circadian rhythms. In German, “zeitgeber” means “time giver,” so in a sense, you could consider a zeitgeber to be like a natural alarm clock, triggering some sort of change in an organism's internal clock, like a cue to wake up, eat, or engage in various activities.
Light is such a powerful zeitgeber that numerous studies have been carried out on the influences of light over the lives of various organisms. Deprivation of light clearly has an influence on health, as does an excess of light, and many people struggle when they travel across time zones because they receive external cues to wake up or go to sleep at times which feel strange to the body.
Other natural and unnatural phenomena can act as zeitgebers. Many social interactions, for example, can provide cues to the internal clock, as can eating, drinking, using various medications, and taking drugs. In some instances, the body learns to respond to particular events, following patterns established in the past, and in other cases, the body can be tricked into responding, as is sometimes done with prescription medications.
In many cases, a zeitgeber is a naturally occurring cue, and it is part of a complex series of cues used to establish natural rhythms for an organism. For example, people who live with chickens often use roosters as a cue to get up, naturally rising earlier or later in the day throughout the year as roosters crow at different times, depending on when the sunrise is. Roosters actually crow before the sunrise, typically, which may come as a surprise to some people, and the birds have an uncanny ability to recognize the time of sunrise, tending to be very reliable clocks.
Because the internal clock relies on zeitgebers to set itself, a lack of such cues can be very disorienting, which explains why people have trouble sleeping in strange places, or experience a disruption of appetite or personality while traveling. Many such cues are so subtle that people don't realize how influential they are until they are gone.
jcraig
Post 4 @TreeMan - There are a lot of potential reasons you're having sleeping problems. I had a similar problem a while back.
Some of the first things to look for are whether there is anything new you started doing that might have caused you to get out of your rhythm. Are you under a lot of stress? Just changing the position of your bed or getting new pillows can trigger zeitgeber problems with some people. It's along the same lines as sleeping in a hotel.
What I would recommend, and what finally helped me get my clock back in sync was to make sure I didn't watch TV or get on the computer at least an hour before bed since these things can excite the brain. Don't drink caffeine during the day. Finally, read or do something relaxing for the hour before you go to bed. Most importantly: don't take naps! This will completely ruin your system. Good luck!
TreeMan
Post 3 I have been having a ton of problems with my biological rhythms lately. I don't know what has happened, but I have been having a lot of sleeping problems the last couple of months.
Before, I was pretty regular about when I went to sleep and got up. I never really had any problems. For some reason, that all changed, and now when I go to sleep, it takes me a couple hours to go to sleep sometimes, and when I wake up in the morning I am always still tired.
Since I'm not getting all the sleep I need, I start feeling tired earlier in the day, too. This might cause me to accidentally take a nap later on, which just compounds the problem.
Does anybody have any ideas why my internal clock might have gotten messed up, and what should I do to try to fix it?
cardsfan27
Post 2 At least for me, eating is probably my biggest zeitgeber. I always think it is interesting that every day I start to get hungry right around noon and 6 in the evening. Even if I have eaten a snack soon before my normal lunch time, I still feel hungry.
Are the signals that describe a zeitgeber physical in some way, or are they purely mental? When my body starts to feel hungry at meal times, is it because my stomach starts to produce gastric juices like it has every day for weeks before, or does my brain just start telling me that it is time to eat and then I feel hungry?
Izzy78
Post 1 I read something a while ago that looking at a computer screen at night can have interesting effects on your circadian clock.
Since the light that comes from a computer screen is mostly white light like the light that comes from the sun, it can stop some people from going to sleep when they need to.
I have seen a few programs that are able to change the type of light that comes from your computer screen to more blues. I'm not sure whether it really works or if it is just an idea at this point.
Personally, I don't think I have ever noticed a problem with sleeping after I have been looking at a computer screen for a while, but maybe I am one of the people the article mentions that don't realize the influence since it has been a gradual change
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In subjects who work, it is common to observe a worsening of depressive mood at the beginning of the week, when social rhythms have been lost during the weekend and have not yet been retrained by professional constraints (Monday mornings).
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A certain number of other arguments highlight the clear link between emotional control and sleeping time. It suffices to spend a night without sleep to understand the degree to which a simple reduction in sleeping time can cause moodiness, aggressiveness, episodes of crying, explosions of rage, and other emotional reactions. All these symptoms are directly linked to the most archaic parts of our brains, collectively called the limbic zone. Under normal circumstances, these areas are linked to the prefrontal lobe, which is the “adult” and reasonable area responsible for our intelligence. Indeed, many authors think that human beings are above all a “prefrontal animal.”
It was in order to allow the development of the prefrontal lobe that our ancestors experienced a gradual diminution of the supraorbital ridge and disappearance of the receding forehead characteristic of most large apes. This part of our brain, capable of controlling instinctive and affective movements, is probably the anatomical seat of what differentiates humans from other animals. Indeed, it has been shown that experimental conditions of sleep deprivation will “disconnect” the prefrontal lobe from the limbic zone. This disconnection deprives the conscious and reasonable part of our brain of any control over emotions, hence an increase in emotiveness and ultimately in violence and aggressiveness. It is therefore possible to hypothesize fromthesemechanisms that chronic sleep deprivation favors depression, which would help to explain the increased incidence of this condition at a general epidemiological level.6
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A certain number of other arguments highlight the clear link between emotional control and sleeping time. It suffices to spend a night without sleep to understand the degree to which a simple reduction in sleeping time can cause moodiness, aggressiveness, episodes of crying, explosions of rage, and other emotional reactions. All these symptoms are directly linked to the most archaic parts of our brains, collectively called the limbic zone. Under normal circumstances, these areas are linked to the prefrontal lobe, which is the “adult” and reasonable area responsible for our intelligence. Indeed, many authors think that human beings are above all a “prefrontal animal.”
It was in order to allow the development of the prefrontal lobe that our ancestors experienced a gradual diminution of the supraorbital ridge and disappearance of the receding forehead characteristic of most large apes. This part of our brain, capable of controlling instinctive and affective movements, is probably the anatomical seat of what differentiates humans from other animals. Indeed, it has been shown that experimental conditions of sleep deprivation will “disconnect” the prefrontal lobe from the limbic zone. This disconnection deprives the conscious and reasonable part of our brain of any control over emotions, hence an increase in emotiveness and ultimately in violence and aggressiveness. It is therefore possible to hypothesize fromthesemechanisms that chronic sleep deprivation favors depression, which would help to explain the increased incidence of this condition at a general epidemiological level.6
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Therapy involving adjustment of rhythms must be considered as supplementary to the therapies referred to above. It is thus necessary to reinforce the circadian rhythms through behavioral measures: getting up earlier in the morning (always at the same time), physical exercise immediately on rising, a long hot shower, a relatively high-protein breakfast, and exposure to brilliant white light at 10 000 lux.
In the evening, no intensive physical exercise or excessively stimulating or stressful activities, an evening meal containing slow-release carbohydrates*, a warm bath, and low lighting to encourage the release of endogenous melatonin.
When these recommendations regarding healthy rhythms are respected, a rapid improvement can be observed in general wellbeing and a reduction in residual symptoms: morning tiredness, insomnia, morning gloominess. Although there is a dearth of studies in this area, it is possible that rigorous compliance with this chronotherapy may to some extent reduce the risk of recurrence. _
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Once you start considering the unconscious effects of design, the architectural features of many institutional structures begin to offer clues about their intended purpose.
Big airports, such as SFO, often require large, wide hallways that allow people to see the windows at the end, "so that they get a sense of orientation — they know where they're going, and that they're going to get there," Sperry says.
American courthouses are designed hierarchically, in that the judge is always two steps up, while the witness stand and jury boxes are one step up. "It creates this kind of power relationship where everyone looks up at the judge, because the judge is supposed to be this unquestioned authority," Sperry says.
"But I saw a picture of a court in the Netherlands, and it looked more like a conference room. There was a big table, and there were seats all around it, and one of those seats was for the judge." He smiles conspiratorially. "I was like, 'Huh. Can you really do that?'"
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"In a combined sample of 61,392 adults from 11 countries, the total lifetime prevalences were 0.6 percent for BP-I, 0.4 percent for BP-II, and 1.4 percent for sub-threshold BP, yielding a total BPS prevalence estimate of 2.4 percent worldwide," the authors report.
Science Daily
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