I was very interested in Flanigan’s argument about prescription requirements, as I have never questioned our country’s prescription laws, but I do not agree with her argument.  I think prescription laws are actually very important because they act as boundaries that stop the abuse of medicines.  In her argument, she uses the example of a man who has diabetes and his doctor prescribes him with diet and exercise but the man wants to use insulin instead but cannot obtain it without the doctor’s prescription.  While in this case, the man should have access to insulin even though it wasn’t his doctor’s first treatment choice, if we took away prescription laws, then people not diagnosed with diabetes could have access to it.  Similarly, with Adderall and other ADHD medicines, if we took away prescription laws then these medicines would become so much more widely abused.  Even replacing prescription laws with a “behind the counter” rule would not stop the problem of abuse because we have several medications like this in the U.S. which must be sold behind the counter and you must be 18 or older to buy them, but that is the only qualification.  If Adderall was sold behind counters for anyone 18 and older to buy, almost every student on college campuses would be using them.  Furthermore, prescriptions are important because they allow physicians to determine what dose of the medicine you need.  If we sold prescriptions as “behind the counter” medicines then people might also start taking prescriptions that are too strong which would also be dangerous.  I agree with Flanigan that if we are diagnosed with a disease or condition that we should have access to all possible treatment options, whether they be prescription or not, I think that the access to prescription medicines should stop there.

One thing I thought was interesting in the reading was how we can have implicit biases against ourselves.  I’ve commented on several posts about having the implicit bias about men and women in the workforce, and although I don’t believe that men are more fit to be working and that women should be caretakers, I also show the implicit bias for this.  I know this is the idea of knowing vs endorsing, but I would call this a type of mindbug because our active brain knows one thing but our passive brain thinks another.  Our same brain is thinking about two different and contradicting thoughts at the same time and sometimes we are not even aware of it.  What makes this mindbug even more of a bug, in my opinion, is that our passive brain can have implicit beliefs that limit ourselves or are harmful to ourselves.  In the example of women and men in the workforce, I wonder how my implicit bias on this subject affects my everyday life and actions.

I was surprised by my test results.  I have taken two other implicit bias tests in the past which have both given me a bias towards one side that I was testing myself on.  I find these tests very difficult because of my learning differences and have not always thought of them as accurate results for myself because I make so many mistakes throughout the whole test and get very confused when taking them.  However, this was the first time that I got no bias results and had equal implicit association.  This is not to say that I have no implicit biases and maybe my past results have been accurate, I just get so confused during these tests I don’t feel like my results are representative always.

This event was really interesting because Timmons Group is not your typical engineering and technology firm and Brian Bortell offered a unique perspective as to why.  Brian started at Timmons as the lowest level engineer at Timmons.  He worked his way up and by the late 90s had been part of the group that bought Timmons out and later became the COO.  When Bortell and others bought Timmons, they created a physical copy of their mission, values, and strategic plan, which before that had just been common knowledge among the company because it started out so small.  But, as the company grew it became more important to have a hard copy of these things and to educate all employees about them.  Bortell became the CEO in the early 2000s.  He still reaches out to all the new employees to explain Timmons’s mission and values to ensure that all employees understand what the company is about and that they stay grounded in their values.  Timmons operates under a very personal form of leadership.  Bortell started working at Timmons when it was a very small firm, and he keeps this environment alive in his leadership style by staying connected with all employees despite how large the firm has grown.  The firm also upholds their value of teamwork because when Bortell and others bought out the firm, they restructured it since it had grown into departments that work together in order to emphasize the firm’s success over individual or department success.  This discussion was very encouraging to hear that there are firms and company’s out there who operate with such positive leadership models to ensure that all employees enjoy their work and the company stays successful at the same time.

I absolutely hate mindbugs! It’s kinda scary that memory mindbugs can cause us to have false memories. When the reading was discussing how the memory mindbugs can affect us when being interrogated about a crime, it reminded me about a show I had watched a while ago. In the show, the cops were interrogating a girl who had come to report a sexual assault and there was very little physical evidence to support her claim and she kept mixing up the order of small details in her story. Clearly, this was the work of her memory mindbugs and the trauma from what had just happened to her, but the cops were not taking this into account and got her to recant her statement. Later that day her friends encouraged her not to be intimidated by the cops so they took her back to the station so she could remake her statement but the cops were yelling at her again and were making her memory mindbugs even worse so she once again recanted her statement and the cops warned her not to come back again. 8 years later some evidence came up and proved that the cops wrong but this was a clear case of memory mindbugs and this was based on a true story which makes me so mad because cops should be trained to know that mindbugs exist and know the times that our brains are most vulnerable to them. I think this also exemplifies how mindbugs can be activated by the way that the questions are being phrased or asked to you. My aunt also works for child protective services and we were talking about polygraph tests one day since we had learned about them in my LDST 102 class and she was telling me that the results don’t only depend on how the person being tested is responding but the results can also be skewed depending on how the interrogator is phrasing the questions. I thought it was very interesting that mindbugs are so much more prevalent in our lives than we think they are because I usually only think of them in terms of mind games and visual illusions but really they affect us almost every day of our lives.

Katelyn Inkman