PBS

Craig explores where our political opinions come from. Of course, most people's politics are grounded in their ideologies, but there are also other external influences such as the government itself, interest groups, and the media.

So today Craig is going to look at political ideology in America. We're going to focus on liberals and conservatives and talk about the influencers of both of these viewpoints.

This week Craig is going to give you a broad overview of elections in the United States. As you may have noticed, there are kind of a lot of people in the U.S, and holding individual issues up to a public vote doesn't seem particularly plausible. So to deal with this complexity, we vote for people, not policies, that represent our best interests.

Let's talk about Gerrymandering - that is the process in which voting districts are redrawn in a way to favor one party during elections. As you'll see, this is why election outcomes on Census years (which tend to be when districts are redrawn) are a really big deal.

Craig tries to get inside the heads of voters by discussing how voters make decisions. Now obviously, like all decision making, voter decisions are influenced by a multitude of factors, but the three we are going to focus on today (and the three political scientists seem to think play the biggest role) are party loyalty, the issues involved in an election, and candidate characteristics.

Political campaigns are a pretty big deal in the United States. For instance the 2012 presidential election clocked in at the most expensive ever - at around $6 billion dollars! Needless to say, money plays a very big role in American elections.

Today, Craig is going to talk about political parties and their role in American politics. When most people think about political parties they associate them with the common ideologies of the voters and representatives within that party, but the goal of a party is NOT to influence policies. The role of political parties is much simpler: to win control of the government.

Let's dive into the history of American political parties. So throughout most of United States history our political system has been dominated by a two-party system, but the policies and the groups that support these parties have changed drastically throughout history. There have been five, arguably six, party systems since the election of John Adams in 1796.

Craig is going to talk about something you fans out there have been demanding for months - money in politics. Specifically, we're going to talk about special interest groups and their role in the U.S. political system.

So last week we talked about what special interest groups are and how they influence the political system, and today we're going to focus on why we even have them in the first place. As to avoid getting too cynical, we're going to focus on five benefits of special interest groups and look at how these factor weigh in a group's formation and size.

So today we're going to look at the rather thorny issue of the media and its role in politics. Wether you're talking about older forms of media like newspapers and radio or newer forms like television and the Internet, all media serves the same purpose - to provide information to the public.

Today we wrap up our discussion of the media by talking about how the government interacts with and influences the content we see. Now it may be easy to assume that because we live in a free-market capitalist society, the only real regulation of the media is determined by the consumers, but this isn’t necessarily true.

How does the government plays a role in the economy? Specifically, the way the government creates and maintains our market economic system.

Today, we're going to wrap up our discussion of economic policy by looking at government regulation. We're going to talk about the government's goals for the U.S. economy and the policies it employs to achieve those goals. Ever since the New Deal, we've seen an increased role of the government within the economy - even with the deregulation initiatives of President Carter and Reagan in the 80's.

Craig is going to dive into the controversy of monetary and fiscal policy. Monetary and fiscal policy are ways the government, and most notably the Federal Reserve, influences the economy - for better or for worse.

Can we actually test the difference between the male and female brain? We are often told that there is a difference between male and female. Despite the most obvious reason of body parts and physique, does your gender really define you in other ways too? Is there such a thing as a male brain which can solve mathematical problems faster or a female brain that can be fluent in more languages? The fact of the matter is that it’s not that much about the gender, but rather about the size and form of the brain. Male brains are bigger in size due to men being bigger in size than women in real life but it also has a lot more holes inside while a female brain is smaller but it contains a lot more of the bundles of fiber that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain. But when it comes to certain abilities, gender is not even remotely influencing the brain. In fact, the gender barrier is mainly imposed by society and isn’t real. <a href="https://rumble.com/v301zo-human-brains-arent-distinctly-male-or-female-study.html" target="_blank">Studies</a> have shown that both men and women perform equally as good on test when gender isn’t mentioned, compared to other groups which have been asked to state their gender. So don’t let <a href="https://rumble.com/v334vp-female-doctors-better-than-male-doctors.html" target="_blank">society’s norms</a> keep you from doing what you want to do and trying new things. It’s literally only in your head.

How is our brain put together? And where do these 'pieces' come from?

How does perceived 'personal space' impact your daily life?

These cool glasses give new hope for visually impaired people to see again.

The act of reading actually has proven impacts on your intelligence.

Do you believe in mind reading? So far, science denies its existence. At the same time, we still hear stories about telepathic experiences. Telepathy, direct transference of thought from one person (sender or agent) to another (receiver or percipient) without using the usual sensory channels of communication, hence a form of extrasensory perception (ESP). This is a great story that begins in California in the late 90’s where a group of scientist got a group of cats to watch a movie. The cats had electrodes attached to the visual area of their brains. The researchers saw how the cats experienced the outside world by hacking into and recording what their brain cells were communicating. With these bits of information, they rebuilt images from the movies- as seen by the cats. Understanding how our brains encode information and how we can crack the code- could make <a href="https://rumble.com/v3349f-6-people-with-real-superpowers-caught-on-camera.html" target="_blank">”superpowers”</a> like telepathy a reality. While it seems like science fiction, telepathy of mind reading has a scientific name- Brain to brain communication. Between the thoughts of us, humans (or cats) is a computer, a Brain-Computer Interface. It’s clunky compared to the elegant telepathy of Jedi knights. So the final answer to our question? Unfortunately, telepathy doesn’t exist, but advances in technology are bringing it closer to reality. We still need a computer interface between our brains- not as cool as <a href="https://rumble.com/v42b6n-10-greatest-star-wars-fan-theories.html" target="_blank">Star Wars</a>. If you could wear technology and communicate with a thought rather than speech what would you say?

It’s not often that we say this, but sometimes it seems that there are worse things to fear than death, and the act of forgetting sits somewhere on top of that list. Living your life with diminishing memories from day to day can feel worse than totally leaving this earth. Forgetfulness is a silent killer of spirit and it just gets worse with age, but where were we? There appears to be a positive side to forgetting after all, but in order to understand it. We need to understand how memories are lost. So we know that our brain decides to store past experiences in the form of memories in our mind, but think of it as a <a href="https://rumble.com/v3emh2-tense-moments-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html" target="_blank">flash drive</a>. It can only store so much. After a while our brain decides that memory is running short and it’s time to do a bit of clean up. There are actually two theories that explain the way memories are selected for removal. One of them is the decay theory which suggests that the brain deletes, so to say, old memories to make room for new, ant the interference theory suggests that whenever we experience a thing that is of similar value with a past memory, the new one is stacked on top of the old one, erasing the old memory in the process. In reality though, both of these theories are true. Our brain creates two proteins, Mushashi and Adducin, the first one breaking the bonds between synapses and stopping the flow of information between nerve cells and the latter repairing that bond. What this means is that we have a constant fight of these two in our brain and it is the sole reason some memories are lost in the process. The good side of forgetting comes with the fact that whenever we lose a memory, it leaves a lot open for a new one to be stored. So don’t fret too much and work hard on making <a href="https://rumble.com/v30j3x-memory-quiz-top-score.html" target="_blank">memories</a> that count!

Sometimes bad things happen to good feedback.

If you were sleep deprived, could you just fake that you got more sleep the night before? Science has some interesting answers. Imagine you wake up thinking you had a wonderful night’s sleep, you feel fantastic and you are going to wake up immediately. However, no matter how much sleep you get there is always that niggling voice inside your head that you need more sleep and you are the thing about how tired you are. But, with simply thinking about how good sleep you had can improve your brain function. In a recent study, researchers told participants that those who spent more than 25% of their time asleep in REM sleep have better cognitive functioning. Simply believing that you had a good night’s sleep, even if you didn’t, it improves performance. But can you really fake sleep? Not really. But if you could stop thinking and talking about how tired you are, and plan a nap you could improve your sleeping. Researchers say that an afternoon nap is an ideal remedy for fatigue from sleep loss. But, that’s kind of unrealistic for us who have jobs and are not as brazen as George Constanza. One solution is active rest or progressive muscle <a href="https://rumble.com/v4hhw1-uwm-class-teaches-students-the-art-of-relaxation.html" target="_blank">relaxation</a>. You focus on one muscle, make it tense and then release. This will really help. While it’s really hard to tell what the quality of our sleep was actually like, you should snooze less and nap more. Or active rest. It’s almost <a href="https://rumble.com/v39z0j-power-napping-pug-snores-through-her-doggy-dreams.html" target="_blank">napping</a>. So it seems the key to fake sleeping is actually… Fake sleep.

Feel disoriented when you wake up? One in seven people suffers from this effect called 'Sleep Drunkenness'. It is the same for everybody: you wake up to the annoying sound of your alarm clock, telling you it is another day for you to get out of your bed and go about your day, but instead you talk to the phone, thinking someone is calling you and then ‘hang up’ to go back to your sleep. It is called ‘severe sleep inertia’, a state when you wake up suddenly from your slumber and you feel groggy and disoriented, thinking how confusing life is. According to research, one in seven people experience this phenomenon, with episodes typically lasting up to 15 minutes after you are so rudely woken up. During those episodes, it is quite normal to pour your morning cereal in the dishwasher. When we <a href="https://rumble.com/v3qc5z-our-sleep-patterns-inherited-from-hunter-gatherers-says-study.html" target="_blank">sleep</a>, we cycle through three stages of light and deep sleep. The first and second stages are light, called non-REM 1 and non-REM 2 stages. During these stages, we can be woken up pretty easily. But when we hit non-REM 3, we enter deep sleep, followed by REM, which stands for Rapid Eye Movement. Yes, our eyes actually move back and forth and we are most likely to dream during this stage. Sleep drunkenness occurs when we are woken up from this REM stage, while our brains still contain a chemical called adenosine. It is a neurotransmitter that travels between nerve cells, promoting sleep and suppresses arousal. When you have your <a href="https://rumble.com/v47itx-starbucks-menu-change-could-be-game-changer-to-morning-coffee-routine.html" target="_blank">morning cup of joe</a>, the caffeine fights the morning effects of adenosine and speeds up the rate our nerve cells communicate with each other. This is especially helpful if you reach for your hot, black beverage as soon as you wake up. So, next time you find yourself talking to your alarm in the morning, remember - there could be a sleep drunkenness anonymous group somewhere if we weren’t all so far apart.