Category Archives: Science

Stress is . . . all in your head

Posted on by

Here’s a thought for a Monday morning (UPDATE: Spiked Online, link no longer good):

[A]ccording to Angela Patmore, author of Truth About Stress, the ubiquitous term “stress” is “bogus and illogical”. . .

Patmore started researching the concept of stress in the 1990s, while working at the University of East Anglia with a team of World Health Organisation scientists. A meta-analysis of the clinical literature on stress showed that there were “literally hundreds of different definitions [of stress], some of them opposites, some of them irreconcilable and all of them felt to be ‘the correct one’ by somebody or other.”

Patmore’s real beef is with the “stress management industry;” she says the number of “stress councillors” in the U.K. ballooned by 804 percent between 1991 and 2003, becoming “a multi-million-pound industry . . . that is entirely unregulated.”

And it’s not having any positive effect on peoples’ well-being. In fact, the British are worse off than ever: stress has “overtaken back pain as the single biggest cause of long-term sickness absence.”

No word on whether the incidence of back pain in the U.K. has decreased :-D

But back to the concept of stress itself. So, okay, it’s not a pinned-down, clinically understood condition. Then what is it? In the eye of the beholder? Is it any sort of physical or emotional discomfort?

I’m guessing that the roots of the whole stress meme can be traced to the 1950s-era classification of personality types, and the corollary (which appears to be standing up sixty years later) that so-called Type A individuals are more prone to heart attacks.

Friedman’s discovery caught our imaginations because it validated something we tend to believe is true, anyway: that our state of mind affects our bodies.

So the stress management movement is our crude and fumbling attempt to dampen down our Type A tendencies. We want to be laid back, let life roll off our feathers. We’ll live longer if we do, we tell ourselves.

Yet I agree with Patmore that there’s something pitiable about all the stress-related hand-wringing. We really can take it too far, can’t we. And, after all, dealing with discomfort (I’ll use that word!) isn’t that hard. If something bothers you, set aside some time to feel it fully — don’t stuff it. Otherwise, just take a couple of deep breaths and relax.

Oh, and if the bothersome-ness is a signal that you need to change your life, then you’d better change your life. But that’s between you and your soul/God/unconscious — not your stress management councillor — isn’t it.

Apple, tree, etc.

Posted on by

From the New Scientist: researchers studied the facial expressions of 21 people who were born blind, and found they were “significantly more likely to make angry, sad and pensive facial expressions that resembled those of their relatives than of strangers.”

I guess it can be attributed to similarities in the musculature of the face. OTOH for three of the facial expressions studied, “joy, surprise and disgust” “the resemblance to relatives and strangers was not significantly different.”

One of the researchers speculates that this “might be because these emotions are for some reason more universally similar and not as prone to genetic variations.”

I’ll have some OJ with that

Posted on by

I’m a non-breakfast person. I’m not hungry when I wake up. I drink a single mug of coffee. A glass of orange juice. Then several hours later, I have something to eat.

Turns out I’m on the cutting edge of a trend.

“No clear evidence shows that the skipping of breakfast or lunch (or both) is unhealthy, and animal data suggest quite the opposite,” wrote Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging — and possibly the ultimate anti-breakfast iconoclast — in the medical journal The Lancet last year. Advice to eat smaller and more frequent meals “is given despite the lack of clear scientific evidence to justify it.”

Mattson hasn’t eaten breakfast in 20 years, since he started running in the mornings. He says he’s healthy and has never felt better.

He admits his studies are still preliminary. But already his findings have attracted a cadre of followers who started to skip breakfast once they heard of his results. Meanwhile, a diet plan that involves breakfast skipping — the Warrior Diet — is attracting followers worldwide.

Being Balanced, the article (from the Toronto Star) [UPDATE: link no longer good] later quotes other “experts” listing all the nutrients you miss if you don’t eat that bowl of fortified cereal on the morning, blah blah blah. And experts saying that if you skip breakfast you’ll overeat later and end up fatter than before.

Well, guys, how about this: everybody’s biochemistry is unique. What works for one person might not for another. Layering roof brain chatter over something as fundamental as the signals one’s body sends when its hungry or needs a certain type of food isn’t the answer & never will be . . .

Is dirt our friend?

Posted on by

In the Washington Post (registration required), Thomas Bartlett has an article on raw milk.

A couple years ago, I participated in one of the cow-boarding programs mentioned here, using the milk mostly to ferment kefir. The potential dangers of drinking it were always in the back of my mind. How could they be not? We’ve been conditioned to idolize perfect sterility — and that’s what pasturized milk is, in theory. Perfectly sterilized.

The problem is, our bodies didn’t evolve in a sterile world, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we one day realize that we need exposure to microbes to be healthy. Even, sometimes, the very microbes we most fear.

Children who live around pets, for instance, and are therefore exposed to immune-system-challenging dander, are less likely to develop a whole host of immune system-related reactions. There’s a tale — floated by the anti-vaccine crowd but nowhere that I can find substantiated by references — that the devastating polio outbreaks in the mid-Twentieth century were caused by excessive cleanliness; the story goes that back when children were exposed to the polio virus as infants (by playing on the ground and eating dirt, basically) they became mildly sick but then developed the immunity to protect themselves from more eggregious forms of the disease later on.

Who knows, really. I find one of the statements by the pro-raw milk people in Bartlett’s article pretty persuasive however: the problem of microbe-contaminated milk might better be addressed through proper handling and storage of milk, rather than boiling the piss out of it.

For more check out the Weston Price foundation, which has information on other traditional foods that we should all probably be eating.

Okay, sorry to have to break this to you

Posted on by

But B-movie biology just doesn’t hold up to the physics.

The incredible shrinking man wouldn’t have had trouble wielding a needle to fight a spider. There’s no way Racquel could have manuevered her little ship in Fantastic Voyage. King Kong couldn’t have stood on his hind legs for long at all without exhausting himself. Mothra would be grounded on windy days. And on and on . . .

Music is good for the brain

Posted on by

A kid’s brain, anyway.

Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.

The findings, published today (20 September 2006) in the online edition of the journal Brain [1], show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.

Very small study. But interesting.

Who talks more, men or women?

Posted on by

If you answered “women,” you need to read this.

This topic is of ongoing interest at Mark Liberman’s Language Log blog; as he notes here:

There certainly are psychological and neurological differences between men and women, sometimes big ones. But even when they aren’t promoting their ideas on the basis of “facts” that are apparently false, authors like Sax and Brizendine use a set of rhetorical tricks that tend to make sex differences seem bigger and more consequential than they really are.

Sax is Leonard Sax; he wrote Why Gender Matters, which posits that men are “emotional children;” Louann Brizendine wrote The Female Brain, which asserts a slew of biologically-based differences between the brains of human males and females.

They were right about cleanliness!?!

Posted on by

No ideas but in things is more than a poet’s conceit. Case in point: according to this Scientific American article by David Biello, behavioral researchers Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University are slowly documenting an overlap between the physical act of washing and a sense of being morally cleansed.

The researchers are also interested in whether there’s a correlation between “environmental cleanliness” and behavior.

Perhaps the outside of the cup matters after all.

UPDATE: link no longer works, sorry.

Sigmund’s long goodbye

Posted on by

Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)

Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.

Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”

I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)

My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.

Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.

I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.

What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph [UPDATE, link no longer good :(], of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:

Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .

Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memory”.

Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”

Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.

Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”

Know in their hearts? LOL

Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:

Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

Excuse me? Scientists may not “blow each other up” literally, but they are all too happy to mine each other’s professional reputations and careers if they feel their assumptions are political power is being threatened. Even when the “controversy” is as mundane as why our muscles get sore when we exercise.

The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.

Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.

Now, this should be required reading

Posted on by

For everyone who follows the news.

Struck by Lightning by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal.

In a review in The Sydney Morning Herald, David Messer writes:

Tear up your lottery tickets. Scrap that plan to visit the casino. This easy-to-read guide to probability by Canadian mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal quickly illuminates the folly of such activities. But it’s not all bad: as he explains, an understanding of probability will also allow us to stop worrying about plane crashes, crime rates, opinion polls, disease and maybe even spam.

The sad fact is that the media tends to feed a state of constant, low-grade anxiety. And when we’re in a state of constant, low-grade anxiety, we are less likely to get a clear read on actual threats when we encounter them.

Fear is supposed to be a gift, as per Gavin De Becker. We need to use that gift wisely, not squander it on abstractions.