NPR meets TED!

I really enjoy listening to the occasional TED talk as podcast, but rarely do I set aside 20 minutes to watch a full video (podcasts are always listened to while I’m also accomplishing something else).  One of the problems is that you never really know whether it’s a talk where you really need the visuals or not.  Well, it now seems that we’ve got two great tastes that taste great together as NPR has started a program that curates related TED talks around a theme that are not particularly visually-dependent and supplements them with interviews with the TED talkers.  Fabulous idea!  I listened to the first today all about “Our Buggy Brain.”  It was terrific even though I’d already listened to a couple of the talks.  Very excited about listening to more of these in the future.  Of the talks in this episode, I’ve listened to all of Paul Bloom’s on the “The Origins of Pleasure”  and its is great.  Even though I’ve heard most of these findings already, it’s a fascinating summary.   If you are inclined to watch the whole thing, (and if you’re not, do check out the podcast), here you go:

Photo of the day

From a cool National Geographic photo feature about solar storms:

Photograph by NASA SDO

September 22, 2011
An X-class flare and a strong CME erupt from a magnetically active area rotating into view in the sun’s corona. If directed at our planet, extreme solar storms—occurring only once every few centuries or so—would light up skies all over Earth with colorful auroras and potentially cause long-lasting blackouts.

Count the passes

If you are not already familiar with the famous video where you count basketball passes and are then in for a surprise, start here:

If you are already familiar with that (and hopefully you are), check out this newer version from the authors of the study that offers its own cool (but less mind-blowing) surprise:

Came across this after listening to an interview with one of the authors of the book at this website.  Interesting stuff!

Stop stretching!

Listened to an absolutely fascinating Fresh Air interview about the latest science on exercise yesterday (via podcast, while exercising, in fact).  So many fascinating tidbits.  Among others– the whole idea of stretching before exercise is actually counter-productive.  Don’t I feel vindicated– I’ve never stretched before exercise a day in my life.  Always struck me as a waste of time.   Also talked about the silly myth of all that water you are supposed to drink before you are even thirsty.  Nope– just listen to your body.  And lots of interesting tidbits about not sitting down too long.  Apparently just standing up every 20 minutes can make a huge difference in basal metabolism, etc.   I was also quite intrigued to learn that having tight muscles actually leads to faster running.  My son David has super-tight muscles– he’s been in physical therapy– and he’s a really fast runner.  So there you go.

I don’t buy a lot of books, but I’m not waiting for the library for this one.   The whole interview is so worth your time, but the link also has a nice summary.

 

My limited hope for thinking more rationally

This is a pretty cool finding:

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

Alas, I’m out of luck.  Four years of German 20+ years ago doesn’t actually give me the ability to pull this off.  I’ve been trying to convince David he should want to start Spanish next year before his brain gets all adult and freezes up on the language-learning ability, but he’s not interested.  Maybe if I could get him to rationally consider the results of this study in a different language?  But damn, he only knows English!  Ahh, the Catch 22.

Make yourself smarter

Really interesting article a couple weeks ago in the NYT magazine about making yourself smarter.

On each of the children’s monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the house’s five windows, then vanished. The exercise was divided into levels. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in. Easy. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and the kids have to keep watching and remembering.

“And here’s where it gets confusing,” Wulfson continued. “If you get to Level 2, you have to remember where the cat was two windows ago. The time before last. For Level 3, you have to remember where it was three times ago. Level 4 is four times ago. That’s hard. You have to keep track. O.K., ready? Once we start, anyone who talks loses a star.”…

In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.

Psychologists have long regarded intelligence as coming in two flavors: crystallized intelligence, the treasure trove of stored-up information and how-to knowledge (the sort of thing tested on “Jeopardy!” or put to use when you ride a bicycle); and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence grows as you age; fluid intelligence has long been known to peak in early adulthood, around college age, and then to decline gradually. And unlike physical conditioning, which can transform 98-pound weaklings into hunks, fluid intelligence has always been considered impervious to training…

How, then, could watching black cats in a haunted house possibly increase something as profound as fluid intelligence? Because the deceptively simple game, it turns out, targets the most elemental of cognitive skills: “working” memory. What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it’s the capacity to manipulate the information you’re holding in your head

As a parent of a child with ADHD, this particular bit really piqued by interest:

Jaeggi’s study has been widely influential. Since its publication, others have achieved results similar to Jaeggi’s not only in elementary-school children but also in preschoolers, college students and the elderly. The training tasks generally require only 15 to 25 minutes of work per day, five days a week, and have been found to improve scores on tests of fluid intelligence in as little as four weeks. Follow-up studies linking that improvement to real-world gains in schooling and job performance are just getting under way. But already, people with disorders including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and traumatic brain injury have seen benefits from training. Gains can persist for up to eight months after treatment.

Hmmmm.  I think I may know a 12-year old who’s going to be playing this game this summer whether he likes it or not.   The Times piece links to a version of the game here.  It’s hard– I think I’m just going to have to be content with how smart I already am.   And here’s  a little bit I wrote on the topic, courtesy of Jonah Lehrer, last summer.

More Great Tits

The bird (again!).  Damn you and your filthy mind.  Well, since my first post on Great Tits remains easily the most popular (via google) I’ve ever done, seemed only right to re-visit the subject (and it’s been almost exactly a year).  Anyway, once again Quirks and Quarks is reporting on some of the more interesting behavior of these European birds.  Apparently, they are all about being good neighbors:

The tiny songbirds known as great tits are common throughout Europe, Asia and parts of North Africa.  It had been observed previously that in this species long-term familiarity with neighbours was a benefit to breeding.  Tits were less likely to abandon a nest if they knew their neighbours from a previous breeding season.  But the reason for this was unclear until recently.  New research byAda Grabowska-Zhang from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University has found that when the tits are familiar with their neighbours, they will join forces to defend their nests.  This includes making alarm calls, flying aggressively and mobbing a predator together.  But the birds need to know their neighbours.   When the neighbours are first time breeders and therefore unfamiliar, they are unlikely to join forces.

 

Forget prozac, try Lactobacillus rhamnosus

The most recent Radiolab, “Guts” was the best in a while (and that’s really saying something).  Chock full of fascinating information about guts, digestion, etc.  They started off the show with one of my favorite quirky topics– fistulated cows:

Anyway, as long time readers know, I’m also a little bit obsessed with the topic of bacteria– especially the good bacteria that is so essential to human health.  I therefore felt a little remiss that I had not learned about this– the most fascinating tidbit on the Radiolab show.  At least in a mouse model, a particular strain of Lactobacillus Rhamnosus (I take a different strain every day via Culturelle) had a pretty amazing impact on reducing the stress response:

The research, carried out by Dr Javier Bravo, and Professor John Cryan at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in University College Cork, along with collaborators from the Brain-Body Institute at McMaster University in Canada, demonstrated that mice fed with Lactobacillus rhamnosus JB-1 showed significantly fewer stress, anxiety and depression-related behaviours than those fed with just broth. Moreover, ingestion of the bacteria resulted in significantly lower levels of the stress-induced hormone, corticosterone.

“This study identifies potential brain targets and a pathway through which certain gut organisms can alter mouse brain chemistry and behaviour. These findings highlight the important role that gut bacteria play in the bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain, the gut-brain axis, and opens up the intriguing opportunity of developing unique microbial-based strategies for treatment for stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression,” said John F. Cryan, senior author on the publication and Professor of Anatomy and Principal Investigator at the Science Foundation Ireland funded Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, at UCC. The APC researchers included Dr Hélène Savignac and Professor Ted Dinan.

Pretty damn cool.  Maybe my daily L. Bacillus GG is why I’m so even-keeled and low stressed .

Golden Goose and the nature of basic research

Via Wonkblog:

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) believes it is time the sex life of the screwworm got its due.

On Wednesday afternoon, Cooper rose to the defense of taxpayer-funded research into dog urine, guinea pig eardrums and, yes, the reproductive habits of the parasitic flies known as screwworms–all federally supported studies that have inspired major scientific breakthroughs. Together with two House Republicans and a coalition of major science associations, Cooper has created the first annual Golden Goose Awards to honor federally funded research “whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd, or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefiting society in significant ways.”

Federally-funded research of dog urine ultimately gave scientists and understanding of the effect of hormones on the human kidney, which in turn has been helpful for diabetes patients. A study called “Acoustic Trauma in the Guinea Pig” resulted in treatment of early hearing loss in infants. And that randy screwworm study? It helped researchers control the population of a deadly parasite that targets cattle–costing the government $250,000 but ultimately saving the cattle industry more than $20 billion, according to Cooper’s office.

Cooper says that his original inspiration for the Golden Goose Award was the long-running “Golden Fleece Awards” that the late Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) bestowed upon the most wasteful government spending, beginning in 1975. More recently, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has taken up that mantle. In a report last year on the National Science Foundation, Coburn blasted frivolous-sounding research that received federal funding, including one study that put shrimp on miniature treadmills and another that asked smokers to mail in their toenail clippings.

Good for Cooper!  You know what, a lot of basic research ends up being a dead end with little of lasting value.  But you know what– the whole point of basic research is that you don’t know what’s going to pan out.  The only way to get breakthroughs via basic research is to fund a lot of it.  Maybe most of it will amount to nothing, but those few breakthroughs will be more than worth it.  Once you start cutting out research just because a title sounds funny you may have just cut out the cure for diabetes.  Is some of this basic research more worthy than others?  Of course.  Nobody gets serious money without serious peer review.  Sure, it’s imperfect, but nobody’s come up with a better system.  So, think twice next time you hear the crazy title of some government-funded research.

Post Prozac Nation

Fabulous and fascinating article on anti-depressants and depression in the NYT magazine today.  Siddhartha Mukherjee nicely summarizes the evidence and controversy about whether and how SSRI’s work.  I think he goes by a little too breezily the fact that the best evidence suggests that anti-depressants actually do very little, if anything, for mild to moderate depression beyond the placebo effect (but a powerful effect it is).  That said, it’s a really interesting look at evolving theories on the neurobiology of depression.   Short version: it seems that SSRI’s in some way actually help to stimulate the growth of new brain cells in a key area of the brain.  Here’s the complicated, but succinct, explanation of what may be going on:

A remarkable and novel theory for depression emerges from these studies. Perhaps some forms of depression occur when a stimulus — genetics, environment or stress — causes the death of nerve cells in the hippocampus. In the nondepressed brain, circuits of nerve cells in the hippocampus may send signals to the subcallosal cingulate to regulate mood. The cingulate then integrates these signals and relays them to the more conscious parts of the brain, thereby allowing us to register our own moods or act on them. In the depressed brain, nerve death in the hippocampus disrupts these signals — with some turned off and others turned on — and they are ultimately registered consciously as grief and anxiety. “Depression is emotional pain without context,” Mayberg said. In a nondepressed brain, she said, “you need the hippocampus to help put a situation with an emotional component into context” — to tell our conscious brain, for instance, that the loss of love should be experienced as sorrow or the loss of a job as anxiety. But when the hippocampus malfunctions, perhaps emotional pain can be generated and amplified out of context — like Wurtzel’s computer program of negativity that keeps running without provocation. The “flaw in love” then becomes autonomous and self-fulfilling.

We “grow sorrowful,” but we rarely describe ourselves as “growing joyful.” Imprinted in our language is an instinct that suggests that happiness is a state, while grief is a process. In a scientific sense too, the chemical hypothesis of depression has moved from static to dynamic — from “state” to “process.” An antidepressant like Paxil or Prozac, these new studies suggest, is most likely not acting as a passive signal-strengthener. It does not, as previously suspected, simply increase serotonin or send more current down a brain’s mood-maintaining wire. Rather, it appears to change the wiring itself. Neurochemicals like serotonin still remain central to this new theory of depression, but they function differently: as dynamic factors that make nerves grow, perhaps forming new circuits. The painter Cézanne, confronting one of Monet’s landscapes, supposedly exclaimed: “Monet is just an eye, but, God, what an eye.” The brain, by the same logic, is still a chemical soup — but, God, what a soup.

On a quasi-related note, Mukherjee is the author of one of my favorite books I read last year.  The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Coolest optical illusion ever?

Watch this:

This page explains exactly what’s going on.  I love the title they use: “a glitch in the Matrix?“

Breasts versus puberty

It’s reading articles like this terrific NYT Magazine piece on the seeming increase of early puberty in girls that used to make me glad to be a father of just boys.   Not easy for the girl and not easy for her parents when she starts developing as young as 6.  The article traces the various difficulties involved and how the medical establishment is struggling to understand what’s going on.  Toward the end, we learn what’s really disturbing: puberty (as officially defined by onset of menstruation) is only getting a little bit earlier, rather it is the growth of breasts that just keeps getting earlier.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, though it’s definitely worth it, there’s a nice summary in the Motherlode blog:

researchers at three big institutions — Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York — published [a] study in Pediatrics, finding that by age 7, 10 percent of white girls, 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls and 2 percent of Asian girls had started developing breasts.”

But that earlier average age  for breast development hasn’t been accompanied by a similarly early age of first menarche (the arrival of a girl’s first period). It’s remained nearly constant since the 1970s, only dropping from 12.8 to 12.5 years. The broad question of why has researchers confused, and the individual question — why one particular 7-year-old rather than another begins to develop breasts at an early age — has the doctors that the girls and their families consult just as mystified. “We can tell you what is happening but we can’t tell you why or what, if anything, to do about it,” Paul Kaplowitz, chief of endocrinology at Children’s National Medical Center, admitted to Ms. Weil.

What’s so disturbing about that is that it suggests that the chemical signals to start breast growth are not coming from within a girls own body (as they are obviously supposed to), but from chemicals in the external environment.  There’s just no way that’s a good thing.  And, of course, doctors and scientists aren’t quite sure the source of the hormonal mimics that are causing the early breast growth.  So, sure, as a parent you don’t want your daughter to face additional social/psychological challenges that may come from early breast growth, but it’s even worse to realize that a possible cause is unnatural exposure to chemicals in the environment.