The Swedish Left Failed the Vulnerable During the Pandemic

Sweden’s “hands-off” COVID-19 response was hailed by libertarians abroad but also by most left-wingers at home. Far from enlightened, the Swedish left’s approach combined deference to authority with a disturbing faith in national exceptionalism.

Three nurses carry COVID-19 vaccines through the hallways of a nursing home in Gothenburg, Sweden, on January 7, 2021. (Fredrik Lerneryd / Getty Images)

BYMARKUS BALÁZS GÖRANSSON NICHOLAS LOUBERE
11.19.2023

JACOBIN

“When the next pandemic comes knocking — and it will — we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively, and equitably,” World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a packed assembly in Geneva on May 25. He made his remarks twenty days after the WHO stopped classifying the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency.

As we enter this new phase of the pandemic and survey the destruction the SARS-CoV-2 virus has wrought on global health and livelihoods over the past three years, we are left with more questions than answers. Many of these questions have serious implications for how we react to threats to our collective existence going forward, with the realities of our age of chronic crisis becoming clearer with each passing year, as heat records are broken, wildfires ravage the landscape and choke our air, and the environment progressively becomes more hostile to human life on this planet.

In this context, figuring out the most effective ways for us to face shared crisis together, in solidarity, is arguably one of the most important tasks that the global left faces. Here, the infamous case of the Swedish response to the pandemic stands as a stark example — and a cautionary tale. How did a country ruled by a social democratic party, supported by the Left Party in parliament, and nominally committed to legislating egalitarian and proworker policies end up being the poster child for an approach to the pandemic based on mass infection and natural herd immunity — an approach which left the working class and marginalized segments of society to fend for themselves as a deadly and unknown virus swept through the population?

The Swedish pandemic response stands as a testament to the folly of basing our responses to global crises primarily on domestic political considerations, as well as to the danger that leftist movements become unmoored from their own basic values and principles.

The Right Embraces Sweden

For many left-wingers in Sweden with international connections, the pandemic has been a surreal experience. In the early months, we waited for the Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) and high-profile voices on the Left to put pressure on the government and the Public Health Agency to change course from their plan to allow the vast majority of the population to be infected in order to gain supposed “herd immunity” prior to the arrival of vaccines.

Instead, the Swedish left — with a few notable exceptions — embraced the herd immunity approach and joined in attacking critics of the government’s pandemic response. As the months wore on and the toll of this pandemic strategy became clear, the Swedish left’s stance inexplicably became more entrenched. At the same time Sweden was becoming a darling of the far right, an example that pervaded antimask and antilockdown protests globally.For many left-wingers in Sweden with international connections, the pandemic has been a surreal experience.

Repeatedly, the international radical right has praised Sweden’s handling of the pandemic and held it up as a model for other countries to follow. Brazil’s right-wing, authoritarian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump’s former pandemic advisor Scott Atlas are just a few of the many right-wingers who have praised Sweden’s response.

The same is true for libertarian, neoliberal, and neoconservative think tanks such as the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the Cato Institute, and the Brownstone Institute. These bodies that otherwise like to rail against climate policies and economic redistribution have often held up the Swedish approach as a shining exemplar of pandemic policy, using it to criticize proactive policies of infection control.


Indeed, the authors of that most notorious right-wing pandemic manifesto, the Great Barrington Declaration, drafted at the AIER headquarters in 2020, were deeply influenced by Sweden’s pandemic approach. The Swedish American epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who later left his professorship at Harvard University for a job at the newly established libertarian think tank the Brownstone Institute, wrote to Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in May 2020, thanking him for Sweden’s “wise and epidemiologically sound COVID-19 work”, which he called a “model for the rest of the world.” Similarly, the Indian American epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, another Great Barrington Declaration initiator who also advised against mass vaccination in India prior to the deadly Delta outbreak in early 2021, has repeatedly praised the Swedish COVID-19 strategy on Twitter. More recently, he has campaigned for Ron DeSantis in his bid for the US presidency.

Neoliberal Foundations

There are many reasons why the international radical right has been enamored with the Swedish pandemic response. The Swedish authorities’ skepticism towards face masks, their reluctance to introduce basic infection control measures, and their resistance to the closure of private businesses (though some public establishments, including high schools and universities, were closed in Sweden, a fact that is rarely highlighted in Sweden or abroad) have naturally curried favor with the Right. The Swedish response, incorrectly described in some circles as a success story, has been a useful example for those opposing state-led contagion control measures.

But there is also a deeper ideological affinity between the Swedish approach and the global right, indeed one that precedes the pandemic. In an award-winning journal article, Swedish researchers Carl Rådestad and Oscar Larsson have traced the unfolding neoliberalization of Swedish crisis management since the 1990s. They note that an ever-greater share of responsibility has been placed on the shoulders of individuals in a process they term “responsibilization,” as individuals have been “expected to take responsibility for their own safety.”

Swedish authorities have sought to justify such individualization of responsibility on the grounds that it can free up public resources. But it must also be seen in the context of a broader effort to shed some of the state’s former responsibilities. As French philosopher Émilie Hache has pointed out, the concept of personal responsibility is a key element of neoliberalism and has repeatedly been invoked in Western countries to justify attempts to scale back the state’s responsibilities.

During the pandemic, talk of personal responsibility had a prominent place in official Swedish rhetoric on the pandemic response. Public bodies insisted time and time again that the SARS-CoV-2 contagion should be handled, not through TTI (testing, tracing, and isolation), improved ventilation, quarantining of the sick, the introduction of a pandemic app, or other measures that could be carried out under the state’s auspices, but rather through the voluntary compliance of individuals with the authorities’ infection control advice.

When Britta Björkholm, head of the Department of Contagion Control and Public Health Protection at the Public Health Agency, was asked in April 2021 why the agency did not put more measures in place despite a growing number of COVID-19 cases and escalating pressure on the health services, she answered that it had chosen to rely on informing and convincing the public. In her view, voluntary compliance with public infection control advice “has the absolutely greatest effect.” In the spirit of neoliberal crisis management, a collective, systemic crisis was to be managed through private efforts.

From a left-wing perspective, this is obviously deeply problematic. To claim that protection from a deadly contagion is a matter of personal responsibility is to seek to individualize a collective problem, while willfully ignoring those members of society who are unable to protect themselves and others. A solidarity-based pandemic approach would have emphasized society’s shared responsibility to protect vulnerable and exposed people. But in Sweden, the Social Democratic/Green coalition government delegated responsibility for people’s lives and health to individual citizens — that is, people who faced very different socioeconomic conditions and had wildly divergent abilities to protect themselves and others.To claim that protection from a deadly contagion is a matter of personal responsibility is to seek to individualize a collective problem.

As has been amply documented, the Swedish authorities made matters worse by designing their infection control advice with the white-collar middle class in mind — a group who could generally work from home and who were socially less exposed to the virus anyway. Infection control advice such as work from home if you can, stay at home if you have symptoms, and keep a distance from others was far easier for those who were not required to be physically present for work, who had flexible working hours, lived in more spacious homes, and did not work in a service profession.

Journalist Martin Klepke of the left-wing newspaper Arbetet has in a number of articles pointed out the overwhelmingly middle-class bias of the Swedish pandemic strategy. Swedish workers, he has noted, were thrown under the bus when the infection control advice issued by the Public Health Agency completely failed to take their professional and social situation into account. For example, while others could work from home or avoid crowded public transport by travelling outside of rush-hour periods, many workers had to commute to work on poorly ventilated, jam-packed public transportation. This happened even as the Public Health Agency urged people to keep a distance — but refused to mandate or even recommend mitigation measures like face masks.

This deeply inequitable pandemic approach has left telltale black marks in the statistics. As of June 2022, 1 in 621 Swedes had died from COVID-19, according to statistics from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. The same figure for Swedes with personal assistance was 1 in 169. Today’s figures are unknown, since the National Board of Health and Welfare has stopped publishing the statistics.

Meanwhile, several reports have documented that foreign-born people and blue-collar workers have been at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19. For instance, a report from the Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine concluded in November 2020 that “income is the socioeconomic factor most clearly associated with the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

Neoliberal Pandemic Management on the Swedish Left

Despite the deeply problematic aspects of the country’s pandemic response, the Swedish left has generally refrained from criticizing it. Klepke and a handful of others are the only left-wingers of note who have questioned it.

In fact, not only has the Swedish left refused to criticize the country’s pandemic strategy, but prominent left-wingers have heaped praise on it. Karin Rågsjö, the Left Party’s public health policy spokesperson, called state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a “bureaucrat with the halo of a hero.” Left Party member of parliament Hanna Gunnarsson unironically tweeted “All power to Tegnell, our liberator,” a reference to a children’s book by Astrid Lindgren, where Tengil, a bloodthirsty dictator, is hailed as a liberator by his deferential subjects. Lena Mellin, a political pundit for Sweden’s largest left-wing newspaper Aftonbladet called Tegnell “the Swedish people’s guide to the galaxy,” while another journalist at the same newspaper described him as “a hero in an adventure movie.” Another columnist in Aftonbladet wrote a sexually charged adoring piece, which mused on Tegnell’s “wonderful torso . . . his flat bust,” and the author’s own love of “academic men with colored sweaters on top of long-sleeved shirts,” a reference to Tegnell’s usual attire. The political editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, Anders Lindberg, has missed few opportunities to praise Sweden’s handling of the pandemic on the pages of his social democratic newspaper, while accusing critics of being conspiracy theorists for correctly pointing out that the pandemic strategy aimed to achieve an imagined herd immunity through natural infection, which Tegnell himself has admitted.

Why has the Swedish left celebrated a pandemic response that has been explicitly based on the neoliberal principle of personal responsibility and has systematically disregarded marginal and vulnerable groups?

One explanation lies in the personal ties between the Left Party and the Public Health Agency. In a remarkable conflict of interest, the party’s health spokesperson Karin Rågsjö was also employed by the Public Health Agency (she was on a leave of absence for her political work and ended her employment with the Public Health Agency in April 2021). In disclosed emails between Rågsjö and her colleagues at the Public Health Agency, Rågsjö repeatedly showered praise on the agency for its handling of the pandemic and on occasion had very harsh words for critics. It is obviously problematic that the person who represented the Left Party line on pandemic policy was also employed by the government agency in charge of that same response.

Second, in Sweden during the pandemic there has been the rise of a brand of left-wing or progressive nationalism. Swedish political scientist Gina Gustavsson has noted that support for Sweden’s pandemic response has had a strong nationalist dimension and has often been couched in rhetoric of national exceptionalism. The cult of Anders Tegnell, with its bizarre manifestations including fawning articles, tattoos, food, clothing, and even Christmas decorations depicting an angelic Tegnell, is part and parcel of this nationalist outpouring that has helped to solidify support for the Public Health Agency among leftists.

Finally, in Sweden the pandemic was initially portrayed less as an acute and unprecedented public health threat than as a crisis of distrust in the authorities. Many left-wing Swedes had fresh memories of the disinformation that had occurred during the election of Donald Trump as US president and the Brexit debate in the UK in 2016 and came to view deference to the Public Health Agency — which was widely perceived as a nonpolitical expert state body — as a means of guarding against such politicized disinformation. Conversely, people who criticized the Public Health Agency’s handling of the pandemic were described as behaving irresponsibly and even harmfully, and representing a threat to national security. For many progressive Swedes, refraining from criticizing the Public Health Agency was regarded as a public duty — even though the agency was pursuing a deeply ideological pandemic policy.The Swedish left has, by and large, ended up on the same side of the global pandemic debate as the far right globally.

As a result of this deference to the Public Health Agency, the Swedish left has, by and large, ended up on the same side of the global pandemic debate as Trump, Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, the AIER, the Cato Institute, and other representatives of the far right globally, whose positions on the pandemic also aligned with those of the Swedish Public Health Agency. Swedish leftists have adopted much the same stances on face masks, legal restrictions on businesses, and other proactive infection control measures as the global radical right, not because of any ideological kinship with the latter but because they uncritically decided to throw in their lot with the Swedish Public Health Agency.
A Lesson for Future (and Present) Collective Crisis

As we sink further into the age of collective crisis, and before the next pandemic breaks out, it is instructive to review the failures of the Swedish left during the COVID-19 pandemic. What lessons can the Left in Sweden and elsewhere learn from these failures for next time?

One important lesson is that the Left needs to orient itself internationally in the event of a global, collective crisis. During the pandemic, many people on the Left in Sweden seemed unaware that the Swedish handling of the pandemic was seen as a model by neoliberals, libertarians, and other groups on the far right globally. Instead, the Swedish left positioned itself entirely in relation to domestic concerns, making no attempt to build a common international left-wing platform on the pandemic with leftists abroad, let alone pursue common practical solutions to the crisis.

Conversely, leftists elsewhere failed to take Swedish leftists to task for their support for a neoliberal pandemic response that became the poster child for right-wing attempts to torpedo infection control in other countries. Vocal criticism from international and foreign leftist groups would have forced the Swedish left to look outward and possibly made them more inclined to review their support for the Swedish pandemic response. Yet the Left around the world, mirroring the mistakes of the Swedish left, also turned inward during the pandemic, engaging primarily in domestic debates.

In the case of future pandemics and other collective crises (such as the climate crisis), left-wingers around the world need to recognize their shared responsibility for combating them and mobilize internationally around common goals. They need to pause and consider how best to translate basic left-wing principles, such as community and solidarity, into practical policies and find ways to work more effectively together internationally.

Hopefully, the mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden can provide a point of reflection and a cautionary tale going forward. If the global left fails to root itself in basic leftist principles and an international outlook based on solidarity — choosing instead to position itself in relation to parochial domestic political battles — there is no future for a global leftist movement in the coming age of chronic crisis.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Swedish in the Swedish left-wing magazine Flamman.

CONTRIBUTORS

Markus Balázs Göransson is a senior lecturer in war studies at the Swedish Defence University.

Nicholas Loubere is an associate professor in the study of modern China at the Lund University Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies in Sweden.

Petitions, Group Chats, and Resignations: Inside the Artist’s Fight to Stop the War on Gaza

“People are just being extremely brave right now,” says Ari Brostoff.


NIA T. EVANS

Mother Jones

NOVEMBER 19, 2023

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP

In the spring of 1966, as college students protesting the Vietnam War organized teach-ins to educate their peers on the war, the poet Robert Bly knew they needed backup. “If you went to an audience [at that time],” he told an interviewer in 1970, “I’d say 90 percent would be in favor of the war and 10 percent would be against it.”

To support their efforts, he organized a “read-in” with the poet David Ray at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The event, which brought poets, veterans, and students together to read and recite anti-war poetry, was so successful they decided to go further, eventually organizing hundreds of rallies, teach-ins, and demonstrations for writers invested in ending the war. Under Bly and Ray’s leadership, this group became American Writers Against the Vietnam War.

Their members and allies included 20th century literary icons like Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley and they used their platforms (In Bly’s case his $1,000 prize money from winning the 1968 National Book Award) to bail draft resistors out of jail and generate support for the anti-war movement. Their work contributed to the groundswell of opposition that eroded support for the Vietnam War and remains an enduring example of the unique role artists can play during wartime.

Ari Brostoff, a senior editor at Jewish Currents who uses they/them pronouns, reflected on that role in the aftermath of October 7, as their inbox was flooded with petitions and open letters expressing solidarity with Palestine. Many of these letters were followed by a swift wave of backlash. 92NY, originally established as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, lost staff and speakers after abruptly canceling a reading by author Viet Thanh Nguyen for his participation in an open letter calling for a ceasefire. One of the highest ranking art editors in the magazine world, David Velasco, was ousted late last month for publishing a letter signed by thousands of artists calling on cultural institutions to express solidarity with Palestine and support a ceasefire. The magazine, Artforum, is now facing a boycott by high-profile artists.

It became clear to Brostoff and a growing group of creatives that writers needed some kind of hub from which to respond to the backlash and support organizing against the war. Drawing on inspiration from American Writers Against the Vietnam War, they established Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG). They, like their namesake, are protesting the war through cultural organizing, which seeks to mobilize artists through tactics like petitions, protests, and boycotts around political goals. That work is already causing an uproar in media circles. Two signees of the letter who wrote for the New York Times Magazine, Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles, were reportedly confronted by management and forced to resign. Their departures underlined the risks associated with speaking out against the war.

As they build support for a cultural boycott of Israel that pushes their industries to divest from Israeli institutions and condemn the war on Gaza, they have gained the support of major media and Hollywood power players, including Game of Thrones author, George R.R. Martin, New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, and the poet Ocean Vuong

Though cultural organizing in 2023 looks different than it did in 1966, the goals remain largely the same: ending war through culture and art. I caught up with Brostoff to discuss cultural boycotts, the costs of solidarity, and how WAWOG plans to build “a new cultural front for a free Palestine.”

What was the genesis of Writers Against the War on Gaza?

We initially got together in the aftermath of October 7 because there were all these open letters going around. There was such an impulse for writers and artists who were appalled by what was happening to speak and to do that collectively, but it became clear that those letters wouldn’t go far without infrastructure, be it an organization or a network of allies that can help support and sustain our voices.

Our early conversations were focused on a few goals. First, we wanted to aggregate all the letters and to put everyone working on them in conversation with each other. We also wanted to create a hub to take in information about the repression we knew would happen, like the firing of David Velasco, what happened at 92NY, and the New York Times, and establish a central place to respond collectively. And finally, we wanted to mobilize writers and artists.

What is cultural organizing?

I define cultural organizing as organizing that happens among culture workers. That includes people who write books, make movies, fashion, media, or create art. These are all people that produce culture and language. They help us make sense of the world. Through cultural organizing we can target cultural institutions and hold them accountable for things like, in this case, endorsing war crimes.

Tell me about the people in this coalition. How many are involved? Where are they in the world? What type of culture work do they do?

The number of people on our organizing committee is around 30. The number of people who are actively participating is at least twice that. We meet weekly but there are several committees at this point and extremely active group chats, so there’s basically conversations and work happening every single day. We are meeting virtually although some people in New York are also meeting in person.

And we’re in a few different cities. Many are concentrated in New York which stands to reason given where the culture industry is in the US. But we’ve got people all over. There are people in Canada, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Chicago, Philadelphia. There are locals that have formed independently to strategize with artists on the ground. engage on the ground. For example, in LA people are starting to talk about how to push for a cultural boycott in the film industry, which would be a huge deal. People are having early conversations about demands for the art and fashion worlds too. Ultimately, the goal is for our members to organize around the cultural production in their own communities.

What is a cultural boycott? And what does it mean to culturally boycott Israel?

The idea of a cultural boycott of Israel comes from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that started about 20 years ago to mobilize international opinion and make it clear that Israel acts as an apartheid state. The main way the cultural boycott has been playing out prior to this moment is through musicians and performance artists who have agreed not to play in Israel. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is one example. A wave has been building for a couple of decades now, but organizing cultural institutions to sign onto the boycott, which is what WAWOG is doing, is newer

The logic of a cultural boycott is, in some ways, the same as a consumer boycott. You want to discourage people from consuming the products that are made in the apartheid state. But maybe more importantly a cultural boycott pushes against the logic of normalization. It rejects the idea that Israel’s actions are normal and if you say otherwise, it’s because you’re antisemitic.

It’s important to say that this is not a boycott of individuals. It’s a boycott against the state of Israel and against institutions that are funded by Israel. And there are a lot of Israeli institutions because part of the process of normalization is to perpetuate the image of Israel as the only democracy in the middle east through culture. One example is the entire phenomenon of pinkwashing or the idea that queer people are able to flourish in Israel in a way that is unique in the middle east. Or even in TV shows like Fauda, which is similar to shows like Homeland in the US, which promotes the idea that you have to suspend democracy for “real” democracy to win out. This boycott campaign is effectively trying to turn that logic around. Our goal is to try to get as many cultural institutions as we can to sign onto the pledge to uphold the cultural boycott. And several have in the last few weeks, including cultural hubs like The Poetry Project and magazines like Hammer & Hope and Parapraxis. And we anticipate at least a dozen more signing on in the next week.

In the last month, several prominent journalists and writers have lost work or been fired for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Have members of WAWOG been targeted or experienced pushback at work?

The most important thing to say is just that people are just being extremely brave right now. Within the organizing core of WAWOG, there are some people who work at left-wing organizations where they’re less likely to face repression. Some people are self-employed. And then there are artists who signed the Artforum letter who are being threatened by gallerists and being dropped by collectors. There are also people in our coalition who work for mainstream cultural organizations and are putting a lot on the line right now. I don’t think anyone can be guaranteed safety from reprisal for engaging in this kind of speech, but I think the calculus is that work has to be done because it’s fucking important


What’s interesting about this moment is the repression people are facing for speaking out in solidarity with Palestine actually speaks to what writers and artists can do through political speech. It’s quite different from what we’re used to. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a moment in my own lifetime where it seemed possible for a critical mass of people to change the cultural logic in real time. And it’s not as if repression of people in solidarity with Palestine is new. That’s been going on for as long as the Palestinian liberation movement has existed. Of course, people have broken that taboo before, but something different is happening now. The firmament of Zionist political and cultural logic is starting to break. And you can see that in the fact that this is not a popular war. You can see it in Joe Biden’s declining popularity and in the massive protests taking place around the world.

What role do you think culture plays in moments of political and social upheaval?

I keep thinking about two historical moments where culture changed everything. The first is the movement that is sometimes referred to as the “Cultural Front” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the US, it brought socialist and communist artists together who were trying to build a culture for and in support of working-class struggles. Most of the work we now think of as Americana came out of that movement. Artists like Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Diego Rivera. They were engaged in this project of building working class culture and refusing the idea that capitalism was inevitable.

The other example is ACT UP. ACT UP was obviously also doing work in the political sphere, but they were also generating new forms of culture. They were engaged in cultural work in the 1980s and 1990s partly because the gay people who were most affected by AIDS were also people central to the culture industry. They had access to those levers and they refused to be thrown out of the public sphere. Instead of hiding or operating through the logic of the closet, they changed the culture. They made art, wrote plays, and used photography to make their experiences known. It wasn’t focused on a liberal plea for acceptance or recognition. It was about showing a fully uncompromising, unapologetic vision of gay life to the world. And the cultural logic around queerness did change after that. They did something that we are still hugely indebted to.

The same is true of American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The musicians, writers, artists, and youth creating culture at that time was a huge part of coalescing resistance to the Vietnam War. They helped create a movement that said: we reject this imperial war. We are the people, and this is not our war


What do you hope to achieve over the next month?

The cultural boycott is key. If we can make signing onto the boycott an expectation for organizations on the left and start making real inroads into more mainstream culture—the fashion industry, Hollywood, the art world and so forth, we will have done our job. We’re also working to force mainstream media organizations to change the way they are covering Israel and Palestine. We’re not naive. We work in and around these institutions. We know they don’t want to change. We’re in a moment when people are being fired, threatened, and blacklisted. But it remains to be seen whether this kind of repression is going to work. Because while it is intense, I don’t think it’s working that well. People are continuing to speak out, more now than ever before

K-12 schools improve protection against online attacks, but many are vulnerable to ransomware gangs

ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
Sun, November 19, 2023 

FILE - Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, speaks during a news briefing at the White House, Monday, March 21, 2022, in Washington. Since a White House conference in August on ransomware threats, dozens of school districts have signed up for free cybersecurity services, and federal officials have hosted exercises with schools to help them learn how to better secure their networks, said Neuberger. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some K-12 public schools are racing to improve protection against the threat of online attacks, but lax cybersecurity means thousands of others are vulnerable to ransomware gangs that can steal confidential data and disrupt operations.

Since a White House conference in August on ransomware threats, dozens of school districts have signed up for free cybersecurity services, and federal officials have hosted exercises with schools to help them learn how to better secure their networks, said Anne Neuberger, the Biden's administration's deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.

Neuberger said more districts need to take advantage of programs available that would better guard against online attackers who are increasingly targeting schools. Their aim is to lock up computer systems, and in some cases, steal and publish sensitive personal information if a ransom is not paid.


“Compromises happens again and again, often in the same way, and there are defenses to protect against it. And here the government has really brought companies together, brought agencies together to deploy some of those," Neuberger said in an interview. “Don’t give up. Reach out and sign up. And your kids will be a lot safer online."

The administration announced steps over the summer to help cash-strapped schools, which have been slow to build up cybersecurity defenses. Ransomware attackers, many of whom are based in Russia, have not only forced schools to temporarily close but have exposed a wealth of students' private information.

Last month, parents sued the Clark County School District in Nevada, alleging a ransomware attack led to the release of highly sensitive information about teachers, students and their families in the country's fifth largest school district. In another high-profile case this year, hackers broke into the Minneapolis Public Schools system and dumped sexual assault case records and other sensitive files online after the district refused to pay a $1 million ransom.

More than 9,000 small public school districts across the United States with up to 2,500 students — that's roughly 70 percent of public districts in the country — are now eligible for free cybersecurity services from web security company Cloudflare through a new program called Project Cybersafe Schools, Neuberger said. Since August, roughly 140 districts in 32 states have signed up for the program, which provides free email security and other online threat protection, she said.

James Hatz, technology coordinator for Rush City Public Schools in Minnesota, said the program arrived just in time for their district, quickly stopping 100 suspicious emails from getting to staff. Hatz said cybercriminals often try to get teachers to click on malicious links by pretending to be an administrator sharing documents about things such as pay raises.

“We are not going to be bulletproof, but the more we can do to make it harder, the better between user training, this program and everything else,” Hatz said.

Neuberger also said a $20 million grant program from Amazon Web Services that is designed to help schools improve their cybersecurity has received about 130 applications.

The Federal Communications Commission has also proposed a pilot program that would make up to $200 million available over three years to strengthen cyber defense in schools and libraries. Neuberger said the hope is that money will be available to schools in the “near future.”

But Doug Levin, director of the K12 Security Information eXchange, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps schools defend against cybersecurity risk, said he fears attacks against schools are going to continue to grow both in frequency and severity without more federal support and requirements that schools have baseline cybersecurity controls.

“Most have underfunded their IT functions. They do not have cybersecurity experts on staff. And they’re increasingly being viewed as as a soft target by cyber criminals," Levin said. “So, ultimately I think the federal government is going to need to do more.”

Editorial: Inoculation against extremism: Censorship only leaves us more vulnerable

2023/11/21

Osama bin Laden, right, and top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, left, on television, April 15, 2002, Jalalabad, Afghanistan. - Al-Jazeera/Zuma Press/TNS

New Yorkers were shocked and appalled when some social media personalities rediscovered a 2002 “Letter to America” in which Osama Bin Laden, dripping with antisemitism, criticized U.S. foreign policy, suggesting it painted a more compelling picture of the terrorist. While the rehabilitation of the dead jihadist behind 9/11 may have been overstated, the Guardian, which had hosted a version of the letter, pulled it from its site.

We’ve defended the principles of free speech many times here, including several in the past several weeks as some institutions have turned towards speech restrictionism in response to widespread public discourse and high tensions in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and its subsequent military response.

It is crucial to note, though, that this isn’t a principle for its own sake. There is a practical purpose to having robust public discussion, in particular around contentious social and political topics and including unpopular or controversial ideas. Exposure to ideas, even bad ones, is the only way for people, especially young people, to develop antibodies against extremism. We should know by now that little is as enticing as the forbidden; to hide ideas is to all but beg those casting about for political identity to ask “what are they trying to hide?”

Stalin, Hitler and Mao are all worthy of study, as is another blood-soaked fiend, Bin Laden. To the ignorant and ahistorical who do their scholarly research on TikTok, some of these monsters’ rhetoric may sound intriguing. But what is needed is education to what they really stood for and what they really did. Shutting down access is a great way to generate sympathy and additional cachet for seemingly forbidden ideas.

We can practically guarantee that scrubbing the Bin Laden letter from the Guardian’s site has just driven more people to go looking for it, perhaps in places where there won’t be quite as much contextualization or where it’ll be an entrypoint to more dangerous calls to action.

This is in no way an entreaty to reevaluate Bin Laden nor a call to disseminate his letter. Any ideas the man might have are but a footnote to his campaign of murder and terrorism — a campaign led, by the way, by a former billionaire business school student who chose to reinvent himself as a revolutionary.

It’s not a call for all speech to be tolerated everywhere; it makes sense to have some social media moderation of harmful medical misinformation around vaccines and eating disorders, for example, and no institution, university or otherwise, should tolerate members calling for violence against or harassment of others.

We are pointing out that efforts to hide what is ultimately a historically significant document, or to tamp down on expressions of political opinion, are not only anti-democratic but most often backfire. Students who have valid criticisms of Israel’s policies and the country’s military campaign against Hamas are not going to soften their stance by having their campus groups banned and job prospects threatened; they’ll turn towards extreme versions of those positions.

Young people must be able to read and discuss disputed or outright bad ideas without risking their futures. You can’t keep someone in a clean room and be shocked that the first contact with the flu is almost fatal.

___

© New York Daily News

New study pinpoints the most common long-term challenges after psychedelic use

2023/11/18


A recent study explored the enduring challenges individuals face after using psychedelic substances like psilocybin and LSD, finding that emotional difficulties, such as anxiety and fear, were the most common, along with self-perception and cognitive issues. The study, published in PLOS One, also identified factors that could contribute to these difficulties.

The motivation behind this study lies in the growing interest and use of psychedelic substances like psilocybin and LSD for various purposes, including therapy and personal growth. These substances have shown potential in treating conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and they are being considered for legal medical use in some countries. However, along with the potential benefits, there have been reports of individuals experiencing enduring difficulties or challenges after using psychedelics.

“We felt that there was a research gap in the field of psychedelic science, specifically looking at whether psychedelic experiences ever led to extended difficulties lasting longer than a day,” said study author Jules Evans, the director of of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. “If so, what sort of difficulties, and what helps people deal with them. These are important questions – millions of people are now trying psychedelics, encouraged by extremely positive media coverage of the last decade, and they have no awareness that sometimes psychedelics can lead to difficulties lasting beyond the trip.”

The researchers used various channels, such as social media, newsletters, email lists, and newspaper advertisements, to recruit a sample of 608 English-speaking adults who had experienced difficulties lasting more than 24 hours following a psychedelic experience.

Participants were asked to provide detailed information about their psychedelic experiences, including the type of substance used, the dosage, and the setting in which the experience occurred. They were also questioned about the duration and nature of the difficulties they encountered after the experience.

The most commonly reported substances were psilocybin (27%) and LSD (25%), followed by ayahuasca (10%), cannabis (10%), MDMA (7%), DMT (5%), ketamine (4%), mescaline (2%), and salvia divinorum (1%). Some participants also mentioned other substances like iboga, 5-MEO-DMT, PCP, Bufo toad venom, 2C-B, 2C-E, nitrous oxide, and sananga.

The most common setting was “with a friend, partner, or group of friends,” followed by “on my own,” and “in a group ceremony.” These settings were categorized as guided (with a specialist leading the experience) and unguided (without a specialist guide) for later analysis.

One of the most striking findings was the duration of difficulties reported by participants. Many individuals experienced enduring difficulties that lasted for 1–3 years or even longer. Evans said she was surprised to uncover “how long some people’s difficulties last – one sixth say their difficulties last over three years. For some people they lasted decades.”

The enduring difficulties reported by the participants were categorized into eight main themes:

1. Emotional difficulties, such as anxiety, fear, and panic, were the most prevalent, reported by 67% of participants.
2. Existential or ontological difficulties made up 42% of the reports, where existential struggle (17%) and derealization (15%) were predominant. Struggles to integrate experiences into everyday life (10%) and magical/irrational/delusional beliefs (6%) were also reported.
3. Social difficulties were reported by 27% of individuals, with communication difficulties (6%) and social anxiety/fear of ostracism (5%) being the most common issues. A sense of disconnection from others/society (13%) was another significant subtheme.
4. Self-perception difficulties were noted by 23% of individuals, with depersonalization/dissociation (16%) and a diminished or disempowered self (9%) being prominent concerns.
5. Perceptual difficulties were experienced by 21% of individuals. Visual hallucinations/visual disturbances and flashbacks/feeling of experience being repeated both stood at 7%, followed by non-specific sensory disturbance/hallucinations (3%).
6. Cognitive difficulties were reported by 18% of the individuals, with difficulty thinking clearly/confusion (9%) and intrusive/ruminative/obsessive/fixed thoughts (7%) as the leading subthemes.

7. Somatic difficulties account for 19% of the reports, with sleep problems and nightmares (9%), non-specific somatic issue (4%), and fatigue (3%) being the most frequently mentioned.
8. Behavioral difficulties made up 11% of the reports, with difficulty with performing in career/studying (6%) and substance use/abuse (2%) being the most common issues.

In addition, 5% of participants reported experiencing symptoms akin to a psychotic episode. This was classified as a distinct category because it encompassed elements from multiple main themes, rather than aligning exclusively with any single one.

“We know from other studies that psychedelic drugs can lead to functional impairment lasting longer than a day, in about 9% of cases,” Evans told PsyPost. “Our study gives us a better picture of the sorts of difficulties people can get into. Clearly psychedelics can sometimes lead to extended difficulties, most typically of the sort described above. We now need to research what may cause these extended difficulties and what helps people cope with them.”

Participants were also asked about their perceptions of the relationship between their difficulties and prior mental illness or childhood trauma. A significant number (28.5%) had been diagnosed with a mental illness before their psychedelic experience, and nearly half of them believed this diagnosis could be linked to the difficulties they faced afterward. Moreover, 40% of participants suspected that childhood trauma might have played a role in the difficulties arising from their psychedelic experiences.

Nearly 19% of the participants reported being diagnosed with a mental illness after the psychedelic experience, and more than half of those with a post-experience diagnosis believed that their psychedelic experience contributed to this diagnosis.

Despite the enduring difficulties, a majority of participants (54.9%) reported still taking psychedelic drugs, and nearly 90% agreed that the insights and healing gained from psychedelics, when taken in a supportive setting, are worth the risks involved.

The researchers also tested several hypotheses to identify factors that predict the range and duration of difficulties. They found that experiencing a more challenging trip and being in an unguided setting at the time of the psychedelic experience were associated with a greater range of difficulties. The challengingness of the trip was also linked to the duration of difficulties. However, other factors like prior mental illness diagnoses did not significantly predict the duration or variety of enduring difficulties.

While this study provides crucial insights into the challenges some individuals face after psychedelic use, it is not without limitations. The predominantly Western, English-speaking sample may not represent the experiences of individuals from different cultural backgrounds or subcultures where psychedelics are used for religious or therapeutic purposes.

Additionally, the study relied on self-reported data, which may be influenced by memory and personal interpretations. It did not explore the duration, significance, or impact of each difficulty type, which could provide further insights into which difficulties cause the most distress.

“Our study only focused on people who said they’d experienced difficulties lasting longer than a day,” Evans said. “We need to see how common these difficulties are as a percentage of total psychedelic experiences. We also need to learn more about what might make extended difficulties more likely, and what specific treatments or interventions shorten the intensity or duration of people’s suffering.”

The study, “Extended difficulties following the use of psychedelic drugs: A mixed methods study“, was authored by Jules Evans, Oliver C. Robinson, Eirini Ketzitzidou Argyri, Shayam Suseelan, Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, Rosalind McAlpine, David Luke, Katrina Michelle, and Ed Prideaux.

© PsyPost

Birds’ nests express their unique style and past experiences

The Conversation
November 17, 2023

Zebra finches learn from experience when it comes to building nests. (Shutterstock)

Walking through a town or city, you will encounter buildings with diverse shapes and sizes. These unique styles exist in part because the buildings were constructed by different architects, engineers and builders.

Birds are also architects, engineers and builders. Our research finds that, similar to human architecture, individual birds build nests in their own unique style. Experienced birds build with more consistent style and use fewer material resources than inexperienced birds.

Animal architecture

Architecture impacts our everyday lives, allowing us to adapt to and thrive in various climates. Humans build different structures to achieve different goals: farms to grow and store food, castles and skyscrapers to display wealth, homes for shelter or as a place to raise a family.

The same is true for other species. Bees build hives and honey combs to store and protect food. Spiders spin webs to catch prey. Beavers build dams to create a pool. Many species of birds construct nests for shelter or to raise their chicks.

Building architecture allows animals to shape their environments to better meet specific needs.

Architectural styles

Human structures look different, even when those structures share a similar purpose. This might reflect differences in culture and available resources.

In western societies, houses tend to be cuboids made from stone, wood and glass. Plains Indigenous Peoples make conical tipis from wood and bison hides. Inuit peoples use ice and snow to make spherical igloos. East African Maasai peoples build cylindrical manyatta huts from earth, grass and cow dung.

There are differences in architectural style among individuals within the same culture using the same materials.

Visualize your home: the size and shape of each room, position of doors and windows, arrangement of furniture. Now compare your visualized blueprint to the blueprint of a friend’s house. They likely look quite different, as humans have individual variation in architectural style.

Our research suggests the same is true for animal architects: animals also build structures with individual variation in architectural style.

Avian architects

Birds are among the most well-known builders in the animal world. Many avian species build nests to create safe, warm environments to incubate their eggs and raise chicks. Nest building is a key task that individuals must complete to successfully reproduce.

Our team, the Animal Cognition Research Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta, ran an experiment testing whether birds built nests in their own individual style.

We studied zebra finches, small songbirds native to Australia. Zebra finches have been bred in captivity for years and are common in pet stores and scientific research. These birds are ideal for our test, as males build many nests in short periods of time using a range of materials.

We measured the sizes and shapes of multiple nests built by the same zebra finches. Comparing nests built by the same male found similarities in style. Comparing nests built by different males found dissimilarities in style. This shows individuals do build nests in their own unique and repeatable style.

Psychology of style

The minds of human architects can be studied through analyzing the style in which they build. This gives insights on their understanding of technology and their cultural influences or social values.

Some ancient structures, like the pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge and Mayan structures, are aligned to the sun and stars. This demonstrates ancient architects had the ability to precisely plan and execute designs with great detail. It also suggests that celestial bodies held some significance to these cultures, perhaps for mapping landscapes or the passage of seasons.

An individual architect might specialize in building structures of a particular style, such as Gothic, Art Deco, Victorian or Brutalist. Their style might change over time as the architect learns and refines their skills through experience.

These examples show how the psychology of style can be analyzed in human architects. We wanted to investigate the psychology of style, specifically learning from experience, in our zebra finches.

Style and experience

We gave one group of zebra finches practise building five nests, giving each male opportunities to learn from this nest-building experience. A second group of zebra finches had no practise building. These males had never built a nest before the start of the experiment. Both groups then built nests so that we could compare the nest style built by the two groups.

Experienced birds had more consistent nest style and used less material compared to inexperienced birds. This indicates that learning opportunities influence nest style.

Practice building nests allows birds to develop motor skills and better manipulate materials. Birds also remember past outcomes of nests and will replicate successful design elements.

Individual style might develop from differences in learning opportunities. Maintaining a style might even be beneficial. Creating consistent nests while using fewer resources may be advantageous, especially if the style has been successful or resources are limited.

We can learn a lot about how both human and animal architects adapt and respond to their surroundings and culture by studying the structures they build. Our research also shows home isn’t just where the heart is … it’s also in the brain.

Ben Whittaker, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta and Lauren Guillette, Assistant Professor & Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Ecology, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, University of Alberta


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jurassic Park: why we’re still struggling to realize it 30 years on

The Conversation
November 21, 2023


Jurassic Park is arguably the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster. Aside from the appeal of human-chomping dinosaurs, tense action sequences and ground-breaking cinematography, its release in 1993 was a movies-meet-science milestone.

As global audiences were soaking up the gory action, the premise of the movie - extracting DNA from fossil insects preserved in amber to resurrect dinosaurs - was given the credibility of publication by several high-profile studies on fossil amber. The authors recovered ancient DNA from amber, and even revived amber-hosted bacteria. The world seemed primed for a real-life Jurassic Park.

But since then, the science has taken many twists and turns. An increasing number of palaeontologists are reporting evidence of DNA and proteins, which also give genetic information, in fossils. These chemical traces could provide unprecedented insights into ancient life and evolution. But such reports are the source of ongoing debate and controversy among scientists. Our recent study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, offers new insight.

Ancient DNA

DNA yields the most detailed information, compared to other molecules, on how closely species are related. However, DNA is extremely fragile and decays rapidly after an organism dies.

That said, DNA can sometimes survive in polar climates, because the freezing temperatures slow down decay. Geologically young DNA (thousands of years old) therefore has the potential to resurrect extinct animals from the last ice age through to the recent past.

Commercial companies such as Pleistocene Park, Colossal and Revive & Restore are working on projects to bring back the woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon.

There is a long time gap between these mammoths and dinosaurs, which went extinct 66 million years ago. There is some evidence, though, that genetic material may survive in fossils even on these timescales.

For example, fossil chromosomes – fragments of DNA smaller than a cell – have been found in plants up to 180 million years old and a 75 million-year-old dinosaur.

Scientists have yet to find evidence, however, that actual DNA can survive for tens of millions of years.

Ancient proteins

Proteins also code information (in the form of amino acid sequences) that can shed light on the evolutionary links among species.

Scientists believe that proteins can survive for longer than DNA. Indeed, researchers have found many examples of fossilised proteins, most notably intact amino acid sequences of collagen (a protein found in connective tissues), but these are at most a few million years old.

Scientists don’t expect large protein fragments to survive for as long as these smaller ones. So the scientific community was electrified in 2007 by the report of 68 million-year-old collagen fragments in a Tyrannosaurus rex bone.

Controversy soon followed though as concerns mounted about the team’s methodology, such as the potential for contamination and the lack of rigorous controls and independent verification.

Similar debate surrounds more recent reports of degraded proteins and collagen fibres in fossils as old as 130 million years.

A way forward

These studies highlight the difficulties of working with fossils, especially using analytical methods that may not be appropriate to use on ancient tissues. The evidence for survival of fossil protein remnants, however, has proved compelling.

These studies are also stimulating other researchers to explore new methods and analytical approaches that might be better suited for use with fossils.

Our new study explores one such approach, using a focused beam of light plus X-rays to irradiate samples of ancient feathers. These techniques reveal which chemical bonds are present, providing information on the structure of proteins. In turn, this helps us to detect traces of proteins in fossil feathers.

Our analyses of the 125 million-year-old feathered dinosaur Sinornithosaurus revealed abundant corrugated protein structures, consistent with a protein called beta-keratin, which is common in modern feathers. Spiral protein structures (indicative of another protein called alpha-keratin) were present only in small amounts.

When we simulated the process of fossilization in laboratory experiments, we found that corrugated protein structures unravel and form spiral structures when heated.

These findings suggest that ancient feathers were remarkably similar in chemistry to modern-day feathers. It also suggests that spiral protein structures in fossils are probably artifacts of the fossilization process.

But ultimately, our findings suggest traces of proteins do survive for hundreds of millions of years.

Real-life Jurassic Park – science fact or fiction?

Palaeontologists today can test fossils for evidence of ancient molecules using an arsenal of techniques that were not available 30 years ago. This has allowed us to identify fragments of molecules in fossil animals that are tens to hundreds of millions of years old.

Scientists have discovered hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells, in 50-million-year-old insects, and melanin pigments in the ink sacs of 200-million-year-old squid.

Ultimately though, we need intact DNA to resurrect species. So although scientists have made a lot of progress, the prospect remains in the realm of science fiction. All data from fossils and experiments to date suggests that DNA is simply unlikely to survive for tens of millions of years.

Even if scientists did find DNA fragments in dinosaur fossils, these would probably be very short. Short fragments of DNA are unlikely to give us useful information about a species. And we don’t yet have the technology to validate such rare DNA fragments as original rather than random combinations of amino acids, generated during fossilization.

Better lab protocols and fossilization experiments are helping us to make more accurate interpretations of fossils. This is paving the way for more rigorous studies of ancient molecules.

In the future, these studies may challenge what we think we know about how long molecules can survive, and may even reshape our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth.


Tiffany Shea Slater, Postdoctoral Researcher, Palaeobiology, University College Cork and Maria McNamara, Professor, Palaeobiology, University College Cork

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why the future might not be where you think it is

The Conversation
November 21, 2023

Disintegrating Clock (Bystrov/Shutterstock

Imagine the future. Where is it for you? Do you see yourself striding towards it? Perhaps it’s behind you. Maybe it’s even above you.

And what about the past? Do you imagine looking over your shoulder to see it?

How you answer these questions will depend on who you are and where you come from. The way we picture the future is influenced by the culture we grow up in and the languages we are exposed to.

For many people who grew up in the UK, the US and much of Europe, the future is in front of them, and the past is behind them. People in these cultures typically perceive time as linear. They see themselves as continually moving towards the future because they cannot go back to the past.

In some other cultures, however, the location of the past and the future are inverted. The Aymara, a South American Indigenous group of people living in the Andes, conceptualize the future as behind them and the past in front of them.

Scientists discovered this by studying the gestures of the Aymara people during discussions of topics such as ancestors and traditions. The researchers noticed that when Aymara spoke about their ancestors, they were likely to gesture in front of themselves, indicating that the past was in front. However, when they were asked about a future event, their gesture seemed to indicate that the future was perceived as behind.
Look to the future

Analysis of how people write, speak and gesture about time suggests that the Aymara are not alone. Speakers of Darij, an Arabic dialect spoken in Morocco, also appear to imagine the past as in front and the future behind. As do some Vietnamese speakers.

The future doesn’t always have to be behind or in front of us. There is evidence that some Mandarin speakers represent the future as down and the past as up. These differences suggest that there is no universal location for the past, present and future. Instead, people construct these representations based on their upbringing and surroundings.

Culture doesn’t just influence where we see the position of the future. It also influences how we see ourselves getting there.



It’s easy to assume everyone thinks of the future the way you do.

In the UK and US, people typically see themselves as walking with their faces pointing forward towards the future. For the Māori of New Zealand, however, the focus of attention when moving through time is not the future, but the past. The Māori proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua, translates as “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”.

For the Māori, what is in front of us is determined by what can or has been seen. The Māori consider the past and present as known and seen concepts because they have already happened. The past is conceptualised as in front of a person, where their eyes can see them.

The future, however, is considered unknown because it has not happened yet. It is thought of as behind you because it is still unseen. Māori perceive themselves as walking backwards rather than forwards into the future because their actions in the future are guided by lessons from the past. By facing the past, they can carry those lessons forwards in time.

Different approaches

Scientists are not sure why different people represent the past, present and future differently. One idea is that our perspectives are influenced by the direction that we read and write in. Research shows that people who read and write from left to right draw timelines in which the past is on the left and the future is on the right, reflecting their reading and writing patterns.

However, people who read from right to left, such as Arabic speakers, often draw timelines with events from the past on the right and the future on the left. However, reading direction cannot explain why some left-right reading people think of the future as “behind”.

Another theory is that cultural values may influence our orientation to the future. Cultures vary in the extent to which they value tradition. Researchers believe your spatial concept of the future may be determined by whether your culture emphasises traditions of the past or focuses on the future.

In cultures that stress the importance of progress, change and modernization, the future is normally in front – for example, the UK and the US. However, in cultures that place a high value on tradition and ancestral history, such as in Morocco and indigenous groups such as the Māori, the past is the focus and is therefore usually in front.

These differences may also have implications for initiatives to tackle global challenges. If the future is not always in front, then western campaign mantras about “moving forward”, “moving on” and “leaving the past behind” may lack resonance for many people.

Perhaps, however, if we can learn from other cultures’ representations of time, we may be able to reframe our understanding of some of the world’s most pressing problems. Approaching the future with regular looks over the shoulder to the past could lead to a fairer future for everyone.

Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time, Liverpool John Moores University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How movies use music to manipulate your memory

The Conversation
November 21, 2023



Around one in five American adults manage to squeeze in watching a movie on a daily basis. It’s a great way to escape the daily grind and unwind with loved ones. But, what can you actually remember about last night’s film?

You may be able to remember the title, the rough story outline or the Hollywood star who acted in it. But dig a little deeper. How easily does a specific movie sequence come to mind right now? And more importantly, can you hear or recognise the film’s musical score?

Filmmakers have long used music to try to make movies, scenes and characters more memorable. Now psychological research has started to uncover the science behind this process.

Music is so closely ingrained in our cinematic experience that we sometimes end up having false memory for it. One study showed that, after watching a brief movie sequence, up to two-thirds of participants believed that the sequence was accompanied by a musical score – even when it wasn’t. Scientists call this “expectancy bias”.

A successful musical score often involves earworms – songs that stick in our minds. These tend to be songs that have achieved great success and recent runs in the music charts.

When paired with a movie sequence, fresh takes on old hits help keep audiences entertained. Their sing-along, foot-tapping familiarity reflect the huge exposure they’ve had for decades. They are therefore readily exploited as an effective marketing hook, especially in movie trailers – where there’s little time to make an impact on viewers.

Music also helps us interpret characters. Research shows that listening to a 15 seconds segment of fearful music can act as an important cue to look for signs of fear in the facial expressions of the characters on the screen.

But how are deeper emotional connections made? Filmmakers rely on a range of techniques to try to create enduring and distinctive movie scenes. They often home in on the emotional properties of the pairing between sound and images. But is there any firm evidence that music can actually influence visual memories in this way?

Research into music and memory has unveiled that the two are strongly linked. People are more accurate in recalling the actions, characters and final outcome of a positive or negative film scene if it is accompanied by music with a similar positive or negative emotional quality, respectively.

This match between the emotional content of the film and music is called a mood-congruency effect. It enhances our memory of what was previously viewed by “chunking” memory fragments into a quick, easy and more manageable whole in our minds.

Irony and incongruency

Irony is linked to the ability to say one thing while meaning the opposite. Often considered a linguistic device, it is also apparent in sound and image pairings. In the ironic contrast technique, scenes that depict negative events or emotions such as sadness, anger and fear are paired with emotionally positive music.

The outcome of this pairing is that the incongruous background disrupts the emotional tone of the film scene, often creating a sarcastic or melancholic effect that is memorable.

The movies Bowling for Columbine and A Clockwork Orange provide examples of violent episodes that are accompanied by incongruent music.

Mood-incongruency effects represent yet another twist in viewers’ expectations. We rely on our own personal experiences and associations with musical conventions to help shape our understanding of what happens next.

Watching a brief clip of a wedding party set against a backdrop of slow-paced, sad music, for example, alerts us to a mismatch between the visual content and our previous (direct or indirect) experiences of wedding parties. The movie script in our mind might be asking, “where is the upbeat music for the party guests to dance to?” Searching for the answer makes us notice the mood-incongruency effect conveyed by the music even more.

This enables us to develop a more distinctive image in our memory. In fact, we’ve tested this in the lab. We asked 60 participants to view a romantic comedy trailer to either sad, happy or no music. When we tested their memory of the trailer later on, we found that people who had heard the sad music had a better visual memory of the film scene than those who watched it with happy music or without any music at all.

Mood-incongruency effects are not limited to audio-visual pairings. They can be found with other senses too, such as odours, and serve to alert us quickly and efficiently to expectancy violations in our immediate environment. This is almost like a “what’s coming next” setting in our brain that makes us pay more attention – and therefore remember the event better.

These effects appear to be relatively short-lived and whether they can exert any longer-term impact beyond the few minutes of a movie trailer or a film scene is yet to be fully determined. Ultimately, they are informed by our previous experiences and stored in our long-term memory, ready and on standby for the next plot twist.

So what happens if our previous experiences of these music-induced emotions are fragmented or missing altogether, as might be the case in individuals who are deaf or hearing-impaired?

Can captioning a piece of music as “ominous” elicit similar ironic contrast effects on memory as actual, ominous-sounding music, for example? And if the unexpected becomes the expected, is the irony lost? Answers to these questions might just open up a new portal into our movie-viewing universe.

Libby Damjanovic, Research Fellow of Psychology, Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

China says no unusual pathogens found after WHO queries respiratory outbreaks
2023/11/23


(Reuters) -Chinese health authorities have not detected any unusual or novel pathogens and provided the requested data on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.

The WHO had asked China for more information on Wednesday after groups including the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children in north China.

As per the rule, China responded to the WHO within 24 hours. The WHO had sought epidemiologic and clinical information as well as laboratory results through the International Health Regulations mechanism.

The data suggests the increase is linked to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions along with the circulation of known pathogens like mycoplasma pneumoniae, a common bacterial infection that typically affects younger children and which has circulated since May.

Influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and adenovirus have been in circulation since October.

The agency does not advise against travel and trade as they have been monitoring the situation with authorities.

No unusual pathogens have been detected in the capital of Beijing and the northeastern province of Liaoning.

Chinese authorities from the National Health Commission held a press conference on Nov. 13 to report an increase in incidence of respiratory disease.

Both China and the WHO have faced questions about the transparency of reporting on the earliest COVID-19 cases that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.

The U.N. health agency had also asked China for further information about trends in the circulation of known pathogens and the burden on healthcare systems. The WHO said it was in contact with clinicians and scientists through its existing technical partnerships and networks in China.

WHO China said it was "routine" to request information on increases in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children from member states, such as China.

The global agency decided to issue a statement on China to share available information, as it received a number of queries about it from media, WHO China said in an emailed statement.

The ProMED alert was based on a report by FTV News in Taiwan that came out on Tuesday.

Undiagnosed pneumonia was not mentioned at last week's press conference, according to a transcript, but one speaker said everyone felt like there had been an increase in respiratory illnesses this year compared with three years ago.

The speaker said that global monitoring for mycoplasma pneumoniae had been at a low over the past three years and outbreaks were cyclical, occurring every three to seven years.

'SEASONAL SURGE'

The rise in respiratory illnesses comes as China braces for its first full winter season since it had lifted strict COVID-19 restrictions in December. Many other countries saw similar increases in respiratory diseases after easing pandemic measures.

"It is just a relatively large seasonal surge, perhaps partly due to chance and partly because there's a bit of 'immunity debt' from the lesser winter surges in the last three years," said Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at Hong Kong University.

China's National Health Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, it published an interview with the state media agency Xinhua in which it advised parents what to do and mentioned that big hospitals were receiving a large number of patients and waiting times were long. It did not comment on the WHO notice.

Since mid-October, the WHO said northern China had reported an increase in influenza-like illness compared with the same period in the previous three years.

It said China had systems in place to capture information on trends in illness incidence and to report that data to platforms such as the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System.

In recent days, media in cities such as Xian in the northwest have posted videos of hospitals crowded with parents and children awaiting checks.

Some social media users have posted photos of children doing homework while receiving intravenous drips in hospital.

The WHO said that while it was seeking additional information, it recommended that people in China follow measures to reduce the risk of respiratory illness.

Measures included vaccination, keeping distance from sick people, staying at home when ill, getting tested and medical care as needed, wearing masks as appropriate, ensuring good ventilation, and regular hand-washing, it said.

(Reporting By Deena Beasley in Los Angeles, Andrew Silver in Shanghai, Jennifer Rigby in London and Emma Farge in Geneva, Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; Editing by Robert Birsel, Miyoung Kim and Josie Kao)

© Reuters