Stanford Magazine

Examining the benefits of short bouts of everyday stress:

When Dhabhar was starting his graduate work in McEwen’s lab in the early 1990s, “the absolutely overwhelming dogma was that stress suppresses immunity.” But this didn’t make sense to him from an evolutionary perspective. If a lion is chasing you, he reasoned, your immune system should be ramping up, readying itself to heal torn flesh. It occurred to Dhabhar that the effects of acute stress, which lasts minutes to hours, might differ from the effects of chronic stress, which lasts days to years.

Dhabhar likens the body’s immune cells to soldiers. Because their levels in the blood plummet during acute stress, “people used to say: ‘See, stress is bad for you; your immune system’s depressed,'” he says. “But most immune battles are not going to be fought in the blood.” He suspected that the immune cells were instead traveling to the body’s “battlefields”—sites most likely to be wounded in an attack, like the skin, gut and lungs. In studies where rats were briefly confined (a short-term stressor), he showed that after an initial surge of immune cells into the bloodstream, they quickly exited the blood and took up positions precisely where he predicted they would.

Fifty years ago, an all-white fraternity at Stanford pledged its first black member, creating national headlines and making the frat house a hot spot for the civil rights movement:

The Stanford chapter wasn’t spoiling for a fight, but its members chafed at the notion that race should be a factor in membership considerations. A letter sent to chapter alums in late 1964 warned that the house was in crisis because it was “not free to pledge Negroes.” In February 1965 the chapter sent a letter to Sigma Chi officials saying it intended to rush prospective members on a nondiscriminatory basis.

When pledge bids were given out in March 1965, one went to Washington, who accepted on April 3. On April 10, word arrived that Sigma Chi’s national executive committee had suspended the Stanford chapter as of April 2, allegedly for chronic flouting of rituals and traditions.

Henry Evans, a quadriplegic who is unable to speak, is exploring how robotics can greatly enhance the lives of the disabled:

When Henry lost the ability to move most of his body and to speak, the disabled world gained a strong advocate, and those who study robotics got a tireless and passionate thinker. A few years into his new life, Henry recognized the potential of robots to level the playing field for severely disabled individuals. Like Henry, many people are dependent on caregivers for their “activities of daily living,” as they are called: eating, showering, moving around, shaving, even scratching an itch. But robotics has the potential to help by serving as extensions or surrogates for body parts. Living with quadriplegia had given Henry a grasp of what ideas would actually be helpful in practice. So he began reaching out to others. He has become an idea generator and a test pilot, using robots to open drawers and even to shave. He has helped create and test user interfaces and programs, providing feedback for his collaborators at more than half a dozen universities and labs across the country.

A profile of psychiatrist David Burns, who wrote Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, “one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written” that has helped transform the field of psychiatry:

“Equally surprising: Burns tells the therapists he wants them to fail. Time and again. They can afford to do this because—unlike when he was a psychiatric resident in the 1970s and not one of his patients improved appreciably over an entire year—he now has 50 techniques they can try to cause ‘dramatic change’ in patients. ‘Right away. Not in five or six years.’ Burns wants them to fail at technique after technique until they find the ones that work for each patient.

“To some of the therapists, it sounds too good to be true. Burns reassures them that the techniques he’s about to teach, once dismissed by the mainstream, are becoming the mainstream.

“I know what he says is true. I’ve read his books and used his methods and have experienced the relief of having my own acute depression evaporate in an instant.”

A woman, deaf since birth, describes how she learned to lipread:

“Some people are all but impossible for me to lipread. People with thin lips; people who mumble; people who speak from the back of their throats; people with dead-fish, unexpressive faces; people who talk too fast; people who laugh a lot; tired people who slur their words; children with high, babyish voices; men with moustaches or beards; people with any sort of accent.

“Accents are a visible tang on people’s lips. Witnessing someone with an accent is like taking a sip of clear water only to find it tainted with something else. I startle and leap to attention. As I explore the strange taste, my brain puzzles itself trying to pinpoint exactly what it is and how I should respond. I dive into the unfamiliar contortions of the lips, trying to push my way to some intelligible meaning. Accented words pull against the gravity of my experience; like slime-glossed fish, they wriggle and leap out of my hands. Staring down at my fingers’ muddy residue, my only choice is to shrug and cast out my line again.”

Educators at Stanford University are paving the way for the future of online learning by providing free lectures on the Internet, but the idea of a prestigious college providing mass online education for free remains the subject of intense debate:

“Within days of going online with little fanfare, the three free courses attracted 350,000 registrants from 190 countries—mostly computer and software industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills. ‘To put that in context,’ Ng says, ‘in order to reach a comparably sized audience on campus I would have to teach my normal Stanford course for 250 years.’

“The stories behind those numbers were compelling. One person who completed Ng’s machine learning course was an engineer at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Another was a 54-year-old Romanian engineer named Octavian Manescu. He wrote that his job had been on the line, but after following Ng’s course ‘with great pleasure and enthusiasm,’ he asked his CTO if he could use machine learning to monitor the complex telecommunications systems in his company. ‘At first my idea was received with disbelief,’ he wrote, but he finally gained approval to conduct some tests, with results ‘so convincing that my proposal became a part of a major project. Currently I’m working on its implementation.'”

A look at anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann, and on how it is possible for people to experience the voice of a higher being:

“In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews and “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” So real, in fact, that members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

“After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on ‘theory of mind,’ how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.”

Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study’s participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.

Now that there’s no escaping the digital world, research is getting more serious about what happens to personalities that are incessantly on. “The e-personality is more impulse-driven and more narcissistic; it gives itself permission to explore or seek out more morbid subjects; it regresses to earlier developmental stages that are more about action without heed to consequences; and it has a more grandiose view of itself.”