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Frontline’s “The Wounded Platoon” is documentary that follows members of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st battalion, 506th infantry…the regiment known as the “Band of Brothers”. It exposes some of the repercussions of modern warfare on the psychological health of our troops.

One of the biggest impacts is PTSD.

PTSD was a term that emerged from the wars in Viet Nam. Some have said that it’s a new term that’s the same as the old adage that “War is hell”.

However, something else is going on:

Since 2002, the number of Fort Carson soldiers diagnosed each year with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has risen from 26 to 1,120, a rise of over 4,000 percent.

In recent decades, medical science has greatly increased our knowledge of PTSD. One might naively think that a deeper understanding would result in more humane treatment of soldiers who can’t cope. That is true in some circumstances. However, our deeper understanding has also led our military to adapt policies and approaches for dealing with combat troops exposed to inhuman situations:

Before the Iraq War, American soldiers in combat zones were not allowed to take psychiatric medications…

But by the time of “The Surge”, more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. These drugs enable the Army to keep soldiers with post-traumatic stress on the battlefield.

One soldier, Kenny Eastridge, came home with PTSD and got into some really bad trouble. He was convicted for participating in a crime spree that included drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, running over and stabbing a nursing student and finally the execution-style murder of two fellow soldiers.

From his jail cell, soldier Kenny Eastridge recalls his own experiences from that his time in The Surge:

I was having, like, a total mental breakdown. Every day, we were getting in battles and never having a break, it seemed like. It was just crazy. I just got to where I couldn’t take it. I tried to go to mental health, and they put me on all kinds of meds, too, and I was still going out on missions.

Like, they had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff. They tried different medications at different doses and nothing would work.

How is this different from human medical experimentation?

How to apply the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

1. Recognize the power of situations
2. Recognize the power of roles
3. Recognize the power of hierarchy
4. Understand the obedience to authority
5. Realize how quickly these changes can occur
6. Be careful which newspaper ads you respond to

Of all these “lessons” I’m most fascinated by the speed at which the changes occurred and how quickly things built up until they were utterly out-of-control:

What followed was a devastating manifestation of the human capacity for cruelty and evil, so powerful and dehumanizing that the researchers had to end the two-week experiment after the sixth day.

What’s most striking about the study is that all the participants were “normal” young men, yet they came to identify with their assigned roles so deeply that their behavior and entire personalities morphed to unrecognizable extremes, molded after the expectations of the respective role.

via The Stanford Prison Experiment Turns 40 | Brain Pickings.

The experiment was conceived and conducted by Philip Zimbardo who later pointed out that:

The study makes a very profound point about the power of situations — that situations affect us much more than we think, that human behavior is much more under the control of subtle situational forces, in some cases very trivial ones, like rules and roles and symbols…

It’s this “lesson” that to me is the most actionable in my daily life. I’ve started to consider how situations—particularly work situations—might have a modifying effect on my otherwise established sense of self.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has caused me to think more about my actions in specific situations. I’m more aware of the expectations of others given my role(s)—and their roles. I’m actively challenging concepts and catechisms.

I once visited Monticello where the tour guide said something that’s stuck with me: in Jefferson’s lifetime he was able to be keep abreast of every major advance in politics, science, exploration, commerce, etc.

I wondered how many people were alive then? And how many of them were doing anything interesting?

This got me curious about the basics of human population trends… I stumbled on this treatment from PBS’s Nova:

And then there’s this interesting graph from Human Populations that illustrates the growth curve of human population:

(It’s also fun to check out all the different graphs that answer this question. See this Google Images Search…)

From that same Human Populations article:

The human population growth of the last century has been truly phenomenal. It required only 40 years after 1950 for the population to double from 2.5 billion to 5 billion. This doubling time is less than the average human lifetime. The world population passed 6 billion just before the end of the 20th century.  Present estimates are for the population to reach 8-12 billion before the end of the 21st century. During each hour, more than 10,000 new people enter the world, a rate of ~3 per second!

Of the 6 billion people, about half live in poverty and at least one fifth are severely undernourished. The rest live out their lives in comparative comfort and health.

Watch it on Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Dogs-Decoded-Nova/70148726

I’m not a huge dog lover these days—something to do with stepping in mess one too many times. Still, I was really fascinated by Dogs Decoded on NOVA.

One of the major themes centered around communication between dogs and humans. There’s the notion that humans have a left-gaze bias when reading the emotions of other humans. Seems dogs have learned this bias, too:

And when we look at a face, we have what’s known as a natural left-gaze bias, so you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side, of somebody’s face.

As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. And dogs don’t do this with each other. This suggests that dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level.

Also regarding inter-species communication was the notion that we can understand a dog’s emotion based on their bark.

DOGS BARKING: Bark , bark, ruff, ruff.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Anger, fear, happiness, despair.

Then there’s the idea that dog domestication may have helped shift us away a from being hunter/gatherers. Seems dogs helped with fundamental changes in human lifestyle:

We are carnivores; we are social carnivores. We hunt in groups, and we hunt in daylight. There are not many other species that do that. The wolf is a social carnivore that hunts by daylight, and, therefore, I think there’s natural potential for teamwork between those two species.

GREGER LARSON: Dogs absolutely turn the tables. Without dogs, humans would still be hunter gatherers, and without that initial starting phase of dog domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.

So put dog domestication alongside of the idea that cooking made us human and you see a picture of serious changes that have radically changed our existence.

A lecture on a theory that beauty—in physical characteristics, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions—is an emergent trait derived from evolution by natural selection.

This idea is counter to a common notion that beauty is derived from cultural influence. Since there are universal cross-cultural esthetic pleasures and values then how to explain this universality?

YouTube – Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty.

This video is an entertaining look at the complexities of human motivation. It turns out that monetary rewards for cognitive tasks aren’t motivating.

Climb high enough up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and discover the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Here are the keys:

• Autonomy—self-direction leads to more engagement than traditional ways of managing to gain compliance
• Mastery—the urge to get better as revealed in learning to play guitar or working on an open source software project
• Purpose—the real motivator is a sense of purpose and meaning; we are purpose maximizers as well as profit maximizers

MTV started with “Video Killed the Radio Star“.  I’m going to start with this:

The web sites in the video fly by fast. Here are some of them that relate to cultural anthropology:

• http://savageminds.org/
• http://www.aesonline.org/
• http://www.worldchanging.com/
• http://www.solutionwatch.com/
• http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current
• http://www.ucpress.edu/subject.php?sc=antcul

There’s also a reference to The Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. (Interesting enough, I went there and found an archive of this site from 2005 that never got out of it’s embryonic state.)