Erik Campano

Columbia is going through an unusually acute period of emotionally distressing events and emotions traditionally labelled "negative" -- anxiety, anger, jealousy, sadness -- can spread across a community, in a phenomenon known to psychologists as emotional contagion. Online social networking can exacerbate it; the first studies are coming out on emotional synchronicity across large groups of Facebook users. For instance, it when one person posts a negative Facebook comment about rain, other people who are in a place where it's not raining, are likely to also post a comment displaying negative affect. Anxiety can then grow exponentially across a social network. Columbia's student body is furthermore prone to communal waves of distress, because we inhabit a particularly crowded campus and literally don't get much physical distance from each other.

Back in 1972, a now-classic paper by biometeorologists in rainy old England called "Classroom Performance as a Function of Thermal Comfort" reached a conclusion that a lot of students know in their heart is true, but don't want to believe: The warmer a classroom gets, the harder it is to concentrate. Based on the amount of complaining about the wild weather extremes that we've all been hearing at Columbia in the last few days, you'd think that everyone here actually wished they went to Stanford, where all winter it's usually somewhere between 65 and 75 degrees and sunny and you can pluck citrus fruits off trees all over campus. Well, with all due respect to Stanford, as far as climate and academic performance is concerned, science isn't on its side. The English students, at least, were able to think most clearly when the classroom was... a nippy 62 degrees Fahrenheit, and their abilities declined with every degree above that.

For decades scientists have been searching, without success, for a Grand Unified Theory of physics to fully understand phenomena like the Big Bang or the God particle. Meanwhile, a few years ago, Stanford researchers found a Grand Unified Theory of Dogs and People. (Well, actually, that's my name for it. They're still calling it a hypothesis.) They drew it out like this:

As the holiday season passes, the daily American birth rate declines. Fewer and fewer mothers deliver babies as we move chronologically from the fall equinox, on through Thanksgiving, and all the way to Festivus. But there's a blip in the data: Halloween.

You might be in any one of a number of positions as you read this: lying in your bed, squeezed on a cramped bench on the 1 train, hurrying across across a campus quad, or otherwise. So let's play a game. Whatever posture you're in, please focus for a moment on the sensations it is producing on your body. Is your back leaned against something hard, such that you can feel a slight, sharp pressure on that spot? If you're lying in bed, how's your neck? Is it propped at a comfortable angle? If you're stuck down in the subway, is the sweaty arm of the foul-smelling dude next to you forcing you into a pretzel position, leaning away, lest you spend the whole ride rubbing against his hairy skin and picking up his stinky cooties (that's the medical term)? Are you comfortable like that?