Proof that I am not crazy

Thinking about exercise 'can beef up biceps'

By Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent
(Filed: 22/11/2001)

A FITNESS regime that sounds like a couch potato's dream has been discovered by scientists.

Simply imagining exercising, they found, can significantly increase muscle strength.

Ten volunteers who took part in mental workouts five times a week, imagining lifting heavy weights with their arms, increased their bicep strength by 13.5 per cent on average.
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The gain in strength lasted for three months after they stopped the mental exercise regime, said Guang Yue, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio.

His discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from stroke or other injuries. It could also help older people maintain strength.

Dr Yue said mentally envisaging exercise increased the strength of the command signal sent by the brain to the appropriate muscle.

Muscles are prompted to move by impulses from nearby motor neurons, and the firing of those nerve fibres depends on the strength of electrical impulses sent by the brain.

"That suggests you can increase muscle strength solely by sending a larger signal to motor neurons from the brain," Dr Yue said.

In his first experiment, Dr Yue found that visualising moving a little finger sideways was enough to increase strength in the appropriate muscle.

He then asked 10 volunteers aged 20 to 35 to imagine flexing one of their biceps as hard as possible in training sessions five times a week.

His team recorded the electrical brain activity during the sessions and also monitored electrical impulses at the motor neurons of their arm muscles to ensure the volunteers were not unintentionally tensing their biceps.

Rape: A crime against the mind?

Module 3: Assignment 2
“After reading the debate between Dibbel and Miller, present an argument about whether a person can or cannot be raped in cyberspace. How are sexually violent crimes like rape connected to a person’s identity beyond the physical body?”

A person can be raped in cyberspace; there should be no question about that. American Heritage Dictionary defines rape as an “abusive or improper treatment or violation.” Now, I believe this is a very broad definition that really includes so much more than sexual contact. If you talk to any rape victim, he/she is just as emotionally scarred as he/she is physically scarred. The mind is just as easy to violate as the body. Anyone can be raped in cyberspace via the “voodoo dolls” because a person is forced against his/her will to do things that he/she didn’t necessarily want to do. This is especially true on MUDs. It should not be a question of whether or not the First Amendment right of free speech or freedom of expression is being violated; it is a question of what is appropriate, and engaging the opposite (or same sex) into an unwilling situation is not right.
Julian Dibbell argues that we carry around the “bodylike self-representation (MUD characters)… in our heads.” He entertains the idea that “In MOO, the body IS the mind.” Therefore, when a person is violated online, they are directly damaged in the mind. He believes that a rape in cyberspace is definitely possible and that it is a serious crime. On the contrary, Laura Miller states that “... on line – where I have no body… - I consider rape to be impossible.” She claims that these occurrences online are more of a question of gender than a real crime. Women are more prone to feel violated online because of their “weak and fragile” minds. I disagree with Miller because thinking that online unwanted sex is wrong does not infer a “weak” mind. It is just wrong, and it leaves women (and many men) feeling violated and vulnerable. Even though she did make a good argument that many men rape victims online are actually laughed at, how is that any different than the real world? Men rape victims in the real world are not taken seriously either, so it is not whether or not women have weaker minds. Society just takes us more seriously because they believe we are weaker.
The mind affects are bodies in more ways than we even know. Through visualization, people can actually build their muscle mass by only IMAGINING working out! Many people have also been cured of various illnesses and injuries by meditation. When we are online and talking about not so civil subjects, our blood starts racing and our glands actually do engage “sometimes even more so... then a real-life assignation” (mentioned by Dibbell). If these descriptions make our bodies react, then why do people believe that rape is not possible? Dibbell suggested that rape is “a crime against the mind,” so even though no direct person to person contact is ever experienced, we do leave feeling hurt, sick, disturbed, etc. which are the same emotions that real life rape victims feel. I agree wholeheartedly with Dibbell in that rape in cyberspace is possible because rape of the mind is very possible, and it actually does affect us in some physical aspects as well.
Like I had previously mentioned, a rape victim’s emotional scares are visible long after his/her physical scares are healed. People never have the same personality after a rape as they had before. Rape is so ambiguous that we need to broaden our definition of what is truly a rape and associate it with different metaphors. The sexual act itself is a metaphor of unwanted force = rape. This metaphor highlights many of the same aspects as unwanted verbal abuse in cyberspace. They emotionally disturb their victims, are unnecessary and unwelcome, and have the potential of seriously altering a person’s personality in a negative way. When someone is raped in cyberspace (or in real life), he/she is more cautious and untrusting around people of the opposite sex. They hide their true selves behind a mask of caution because they do not want to be violated again.