Who Else Wants To Climb Like An Orangutan?

(See more rock climbing designs from CafePress.com. While you're at it, pick up a My Three Shrinks t-shirt.)

While googling around the Internet I found an article by Steven Kotler on the Psychology Today blog entitled "How We Learned To Walk: The Uneasy Origins of Rock Climbing". Talk about a surefire, catch-Clink's-attention title!

The article reviews anthropology finds over the years and talks about a new theory of human evolution, specifically how humans began to walk upright. Anthropologists once thought humans started walking upright after they came down from trees. Now primatologists are suggesting that walking is a natural offshoot of climbing. They site orangutans who have been observed "tree walking", or walking across branches while holding an upper branch with both limbs (a bit like a toddler 'cruising' while holding on to furniture). This climbing method is energy efficient and stable because it allows for four points of contact at all times---it also happens to be the way a beginning rock climber climbs.

OK, so it's a bit of a stretch (literally) but at least it gave me a chance to link some of my favorite subjects together in one post.

My Three Shrinks Podcast 12: Bilingual

[11] . . . [12] . . . [13] . . . [All]

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We had two other topics recorded from a prior session, one on the side effects of psychotherapy and the other on the street value of psych drugs in Las Vegas, but GarageBand somehow lost them (I really don't think it was me.) If I find them later I'll put them out in a podcast.

As a result, this one's shorter... about 18 minutes.

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February 25, 2007:

Topics include:

• Evolutionary Psychopathology. LA Times article, The Mind as it Evolves, by Julia M. Klein, about a developing area that theorizes that the illness of depression developed as an evolutionary strategy, which helped signal and stabilize social ranking. Very interesting reading. See also the journal article, The evolutionary significance of depressive symptoms, by Matthew Keller and Randolph Nesse from VCU.
  
• Mental Health Parity Act of 2007. Well, we have been trying to get this passed for years (see NAMI's review), despite popular bipartisan support. It passed the Senate, and will hopefully pass the House for the president's signature. We also talk about Maryland's 1993 landmark parity legislation.
  
• Psych Blog: Psychiatry for All, by Saminkie. A psychiatry resident in Baghdad who writes about learning psychiatry while having to deal with bullets, explosions, no electricity and other war-related problems. (Sent to us by DrivingMissMolly.)
  
• The Psychiatrist Blog, by Michelle Tempest. A UK psychiatrist, and author of The Future of the NHS, blogs about psychiatry, health and politics.
  

Next week: Could be anything. Send us your questions at mythreeshrinksATgmailDOTcom.

Last week's musical snippet was from Monty Python -- Spam; and Finland, Finland, Finland.

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Find show notes with links at: http://mythreeshrinks.com. This podcast is available on iTunes (feel free to post a review) or as an RSS feed. You can also listen to or download the .mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. Thank you for listening.