Once again this past week we’ve been busy scanning across the internet to find the latest information and Open University courses. This week we find out why true education is for life and not just A-level results day, explore links between brain function and social issues and one man’s harrowing recollection of Hiroshima. Don’t forget if you can share the Open University news that really helps us out!
Areas of the brain associated with social and moral disgust are triggered when healthcare funding is split unequally, researchers have found. A study using a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner examined what happens in the brain when people are tasked with making difficult decisions and found that the anterior insula was activated when people felt an unfair choice had been proposed. Researchers from the Open University, University of Oxford, Exeter Magnetic Resonance Research Centre and Flinders University in Australia were also involved in the study, which is published in the Journal of Neuroscience Psychology and Economics.
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Hiroshima: Stifled stories and one man’s memory of cataclysm. By PhD Candidate at The Open University. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 killed more than 200,000 people. The total population of Hiroshima at the time was about 350,000 and all would have experienced the effects of the atomic blast in various ways. In addition, an estimated 78,000 experienced radiation when they came into the city. Of Hiroshima’s buildings, 92% were burned down – and Koreans, Russians, American POWs as well as Japanese were victims of the bombing. Many more died in subsequent decades due to the effects of radiation sickness.
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True education is for life, not just for A-level results day. “My teachers sounded baffled – even aghast. We had just heard Tom Stoppard talk with torrential wit and zest about his play Travesties, with its brilliantly farcical collision between Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist mischief-maker Tristan Tzara in Zurich during the First World War. “But he didn’t go to university!” they spluttered.”
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