On October 14, 1912, just before giving a scheduled speech in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by would-be assassin John Schrank. Roosevelt not only survived the attempt on his life, but went on to deliver his speech as scheduled. He began by saying,
I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
What explains Roosevelt's dauntlessness? New research published in theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that presidents and psychopaths share a psychological trait that may shed light on what made Teddy such a unique character.
The trait is called "fearless dominance," defined as the "boldness associated with psychopathy." Researchers say that when found in the psychological makeup of presidents, it's "associated with better rated presidential performance, leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management, Congressional relations, and allied variables; it was also associated with several largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance, such as initiating new projects and being viewed as a world figure."
Researchers tested their hypothesis in the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush using (a) psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential leadership, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance.
More than 100 experts, including biographers, journalists and scholars who are established authorities on one or more U.S. presidents, evaluated their target presidents using the data derived from the sources listed above.
The results:
Theodore Roosevelt ranked highest in fearless dominance, followed by
A new study of more than 45,000 women, the largest of its kind, suggests that there could be a link between infection with the Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) parasite and suicides among women. T. gondii is sometimes called the “Kitty Litter Parasite” because it usually spreads through contact with cat feces. (correction: it should also be mentioned that in the United States, T. gondii is also transmitted via contact with uncooked contaminated meat and vegetables; contact with cat feces is certainly not the only means of transmission in the US or abroad).
About one third of the world’s population is infected with the parasite, which stealthily hides from the human immune system in brain and muscle cells. Often the host will not develop symptoms of the infection (called toxoplasmosis), but a fair amount of research evidence suggests that it is linked to subsequent mental illness, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and also increased risk of traffic accidents.
The latest research is the first to link T. gondii with suicides across a large human population. Quoting senior author of the research paper and leading expert on suicide neuroimmunology, Tedor T. Postolache, M.D., "We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies. We plan to continue our research into this possible connection.”
Researchers analyzed data from 45,788 women in Denmark, who gave birth between May 15, 1992 and Jan. 15, 1995 and whose babies were screened for T. gondii immunoglobulin antibodies. Babies don't produce antibodies to T. gondii for three months after they are born, so the antibodies present in their blood represented infection in the mothers.
The research team searched Danish health registries to determine if any of these women later attempted suicide, including cases of violent suicide attempts which may have involved guns, sharp instruments and jumping from high places. The researchers also cross-checked records in the Danish Psychiatric Central Register to determine if the women had been diagnosed previously with mental illness.
The study found that women infected with T. gondii were one and a half times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who were not infected, and the risk seemed to rise with increasing levels of the T. gondii antibodies. The suicides linked to these high levels of infection were also the most violent. Evidence of previous mental illness did not significantly change the findings.
T. gondii has also been linked to suicides, of a sort, among our friends the rodents. Previous research showed that infected rats experience a reduced fear response to cat odors, making them more likely to come sniffing around your feline’s territory. When a cat eats the rodent, it ingests the parasite, which then finds a comfortable place to hang out in the cat’s intestines.
The latest study has a few limitations, not the least of which is an inability to determine a specific cause for the suicidal behavior. "T. gondii infection is likely not a random event and it is conceivable that the results could be alternatively explained by people with psychiatric disturbances having a higher risk of becoming T. gondii-infected prior to contact with the health system," Dr. Postolache says.
At the least, the findings should support the need for future research to determine whether the parasites our cats are hosting would like to drive our brains off the highway.
My research into the traits of influencers and achievers continues, and as I turn more pieces of this puzzle around to fit the whole, more ideas appear to me as a fit for this space. In this edition, reflections on falling short -- more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.
1. Like Yoda said, you just don't believe it.
The crucial part of Yoda's dialogue with Luke is "believe." The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input -- what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here's the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. Another way to say that is -- why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven't convinced yourself that it's possible?
2. Other people have convinced you of your "station."
I've always thought the "know your station in life" idea to be among the most pernicious we humans have ever come up with. The only version of it I like is Tennessee Williams': “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Love that Tennessee Williams. What's more pernicious than the idea itself is that it's often heaved upon us by other people, and they convince us that we are what we are and we'd better just live with it because, well, that's what we'll always be. Really? Says who? Show me the chapter on predetermined stations in the cosmic rule book, please. This also gets back to the feedback loop dynamic, because if this external "station" scripting is part of your input, you can expect sub-par outcomes all the time.
3. You don't want to be a distrupter.
The word "disrupter" has taken on such a heavy, mixed bag of meanings in the last few years. Reading both popular psychology and business books, I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing to be. One thing seems certain -- the notion of disrupting anything--of being the water that breaks the rock--is scary to most of us. Reason being, disruption is perceived as a threat to our threat-sensitive brains. Disruption means that consistency, stability and certainty might get jettisoned for a time, and that puts our hard-wired internal defense system on high alert. Sometimes, though, you have to override the alarms and move ahead anyway. If you never do, you'll never know what could happen.
4. You think, "what if I die tomorrow?"
We all think this from time to time. And you know what, sure, any of us might die tomorrow -- all the more reason not to waste time thinking about it and hamstringing yourself from going after what you want to achieve. Would you rather die as a monument to mediocrity or as someone who never quit striving? Which leads to the next one...
5. You wonder how you will be remembered.
The rub here is simply that, if you "die tomorrow," will people remember you as someone who clung to stability like an existential life preserver -- and is that what you really want? I know for a fact that many people do want exactly that, because it's a comfortable niche to occupy on the obituary page. "She/he was a good person, good friend, good...." Good is fine, but it ain't great. You can't strive for great achievements by dropping anchor in Goodville. My take on this is: it's OK to wonder how you'll be remembered, but don't let thoughts of "good and nice and stable" effect that all important feedback loop, because if you do your brain will be happy to oblige with lots of good and little else. 6. You think there must be a pre-established role for your life, and you might be screwing with it.
This one also touches on the "station" idea discussed above, but it goes deeper than that. We humans are prone to believing in something psychologists call "agency." We want to believe there's a reason for everything, and that everything has a prime mover -- an agent, whether human or otherwise. So, we think, what if there's a reason we are what we are -- what if celestial agency has determined it so? Should we be messing with that? The error in thinking here is clear -- agency is a figment our brains rely on to manage difficulty with as little trauma as possible. The first thing to do is recognize that, and then recognize that the role for your life has only one true agent -- You.
7. Your career appears to be well-established and that's good...right?
Well, maybe that's good, sure. The question becomes, is "established" what you really want? Maybe it is, and that's cool. But if "established" means you can't reach beyond certain imposed parameters to achieve anything else that you truly want, then maybe it isn't so useful after all. Like most things, this is a personal choice and it doesn't have a right or wrong answer. But it's worth acknowledging that you may very well be "establishing" yourself out of greater achievements.
8. You are afraid of losing what you have built.
A totally legitimate fear, and one we should kick out of our perspectives as quickly as possible. Here's one example why: Remember this little thing we've been suffering through for sometime now called a recession? Remember how many people lost all or nearly all they'd "built" during these last few years of economic erosion? The reality is, you can lose everything in a heartbeat through no fault of your own, so why allow that fear to stop you from reaching out for what you really want? This goes in the same basket as "I could die tomorrow." Yes, true, we can lose, we can die. So what? Push forward.
9. You think, "maybe I've hit my ceiling."
The proverbial "ceiling" -- so long have ye been with us, and yet so little have ye given us. I side with the late great Peter Drucker who said (paraphrasing from this classic article on Managing Oneself) if you reach a point in your career where you think you won't progress any further, then start focusing on the next part of your life. Actually, he added, you should start thinking about the next part of your life well before you begin it. The point is, forget about ceilings and focus on achievement. When you start using the cultural shibboleth of the ceiling as an excuse, you are achieving nothing and will continue to do just that.
10. Confusion about where to go.
Of all of these 10 ideas, this one is to me the most difficult because it plagues me almost constantly. Gearing up the cerebral feedback loop for achievement is one thing, but without a sense of focus and direction, all of that energy isn't going to yield very much in the end. My experience has been that sometimes you have to let the energy flow for a while without too firm a sense of direction and see if focus emerges organically. Once it does, you can then nurture it into a more structured method for getting where you want to go.
If you have thoughts on these 10 ideas, or suggestions entirely separate from them, please write them in the comments section. I and others want to hear them, so let em rip!
As much as we'd rather not admit it, jerks often get ahead in our world -- usually at the expense of a lot of other people along the way. Psychological research over the past few years is revealing why. As it turns out, acting like a jerk isn't the secret to reaping the rewards of jerkiness. The real secret is simply letting others place you on a pedestal.
The most recent study illustrating this point was covered in the Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled, "Why Are We Overconfident?" The study wanted to uncover what adaptive advantage overconfidence could possibly convey, since it so often leads to errors that don't benefit us. The short answer is that even if overconfidence produces subpar results, others still perceive it positively. Quoting from the article:
In one of several related experiments, researchers had people take a geography quiz —first alone, then in pairs. The task involved placing cities on a map of North America unmarked by state or national borders. The participants rated themselves on their own abilities and rated each other, secretly, on a number of qualities.
As expected, most people rated their own geographic knowledge far higher than actual performance would justify. In the interesting new twist, however, the people most prone to overrate themselves got higher marks from their partners on whether they “deserved respect and admiration, had influence over the decisions, led the decision-making process, and contributed to the decisions.”
In other words, overconfident people are perceived as having more social status, and social status is golden.
A study last year highlighted a similar result, but this time with respect to another jerk-marquis trait: rudeness. Being rude is a categorically negative behavior by most standards, and to suggest otherwise--that is, to mount a defense of rudeness--would be a really strange thing to do. But psychology research is often at its best when it endorses positions that at first glance seem awfully strange.
And so it is with rudeness, because while most of us deplore it, research suggests that we also see it as a sign of power. A study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Scienceindicated that the ruder someone acts, the more convinced observers become that he or she is powerful, and therefore does not have to respect the same rules the rest of us bow to.
In one of the experiments, study participants read about a visitor to an office who marched in and poured himself a cup of "employee only" coffee without asking. In another case they read about a bookkeeper that flagrantly bent accounting rules. Participants rated the rule breakers as more in control and powerful compared to people who didn't steal the coffee or break accounting rules.
In another experiment participants watched a video of a man at a sidewalk café put his feet on another chair, tap cigarette ashes on the ground and rudely order a meal. Participants rated the man as more likely to "get to make decisions" and able to "get people to listen to what he says" than participants who saw a video of the same man behaving politely.
What this study appears to indicate is that violating norms is viewed by others as a sign of power, even if the observers would otherwise judge those violations as rude or flatly wrong. Considering many of the openly rude jerks we venerate, these findings make a lot of sense. (Though I would like to see a follow on study that examines observer perceptions when the rude rule breakers are caught. Perhaps it's less the rudeness and corruption we admire, and more the ability to get away with it that intrigues us. Maybe we're just a little smitten with the charisma of villainy.)
Taken together with the results of the study on overconfidence, it would seem that jerks are inherently quite good at putting one over on us. In fact, they don't even have to try. They just need to work their trade and earn the praise of their peers.
Contraception for men is a game of extremes. On one end of the spectrum we have condoms, and on the other is the vasectomy. And in between those two options there's... pretty much nothing. You can either go with a simple tool that has a reasonable chance of failing, or permanent shutdown.
That may change in a few years if a new technique known as reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance, or RISUG, is eventually approved by the FDA.
The procedure involves injecting a clear gel into the vas deferens, the vessel through which sperm is transported to its launch site before leaving the body. The gel coats the interior of the vessel with a plastic compound that has a net positive charge. When sperm enter the vessel, they are neutralized by the charge and die before they can reach the exit.
The gel will be marketed in the U.S. under the name Vasalgel, though, as I mentioned, it has a series of hurdles to overcome first. Even in India where the gel was invented it's still in clinical trials.
The website HowStuffWorks has a fascinating article about RISUG that covers its genesis as a method to purify drinking water. Here's a snippet:
In the 1970s, he [Sujoy Guha, inventor of the procedure] began investigating cost-effective techniques to purify rural water systems. He discovered that if he coated pipes with a common polymer called styrene maleic anhydride, he could kill bacteria lurking in the water supply. The process took advantage of an electric charge differential existing between the polymer, which was positively charged, and the bacteria cells, which carried a net negative charge. As microbes traveled through the polymer-lined pipes and encountered the strong positive charge, the attractive forces pulled them apart.
When the Indian government began worrying about its rapidly growing population, Guha wondered if the same polymer could work for male contraception. After all, the vas deferens resembled a water pipe, and sperm traveling through the narrow tubes were analogous to bacteria. Guha ran some tests and found that the procedure worked perfectly...
Imagine that on a day just like any other, you grab your mail and start thumbing through the ads and solicitations per usual, and you come across a “pre-approval” letter from a bank offering you a credit card. You open it expecting to see the typical application and prepaid envelope—but this time you find something else as well.
You pull out the unexpected object, which turns out to be a long cheek swab sealed in plastic, the sort used in forensics labs for DNA sampling. Reading the application, you find that this is no typical credit offer. The bank has sent you an offer of trade: a sample of your DNA for a beefy credit limit at low interest.
While I don’t expect to receive an offer like this anytime in the immediate future, all signs point to it coming eventually. So the question is: what’s your DNA worth? Will you accept more credit, or perhaps additional come-ons like reward points toward that vacation you’ve been wanting, for a quick swab along the inside of your cheek?
The news (originally broken by The Wall Street Journal) that VISA submitted a patent application mentioning gathering of DNA data for marketing purposes has many concerned, and legitimately so. It was one thing when your subscription to Men’s Health was cross referenced in a marketing database with your preference for Hollister t-shirts, but delving into DNA is entirely another.
To make sense of what VISA’s plan is all about, and where this may be going, I spoke to Seth Redmore, VP of Product Development at Lexalytics, Inc, a firm that analyzes oceans of collected data from multiple sources for major companies around the globe.
David: Should we be concerned about VISA, or any other banks or corporations, wanting to access our DNA for marketing purposes?
Seth: Before considering the legal/ethical side of this, let's consider whether DNA information could be useful for ad targeting. Taking an obvious example, we're seeing a lot of pharmaceutical advertising on television. Seems like knowing someone's disease proclivities could be useful for targeting pharmaceutical ads. Perhaps you're genetically prone to gaining weight, or the DNA tells you more about ethnic background (which could play a role in which medications are beneficial or harmful). So, yes, it's probably useful for ad targeting.
Next, we have to ask what exactly is a "DNA database" (the term used in the VISA patent application)? I would take that to mean a fully sequenced set of DNA records that is tied to individuals. Current DNA "databases" are not fully sequenced, but that will change as cost for sequencing drops. As the two primary uses of DNA right now are research and law enforcement, those DNA sets are handled differently. Researchers will sequence the areas that they are interested in, looking for patterns or anomalies. Law enforcement has a different approach, where they store a certain set of "profiles" that they can use to match to individuals, but this information is useless in indicating anything other than a match to a particular person's DNA.
So, for a "DNA database" to be useful for ad targeting, you need substantially different databases than what's available today (setting aside the fact that we don't even really know what most of our DNA does -- but we'll figure that out eventually).
But merely seeking to access DNA, even if the right databases haven’t been developed yet, is unnerving, no? What about HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) protection?
This is where the discussion gets more interesting. HIPAA regulates "protected health information" in the US. It turns out that DNA is not specifically mentioned in HIPAA except for a specific section around law enforcement. (Note that medical providers are explicitly disallowed from sharing DNA information with law enforcement.) However, since for DNA to be useful for ad targeting it has to be connected to an identity -- that certainly comes under the heading of "protected health information.”
Insurance companies are not allowed to refuse group coverage to an individual with genetic proclivities to a specific disease, but they are allowed to collect samples and charge more for insurance if they so desire. They are also covered under HIPAA regulations, so they can't share medical information with companies like VISA for use in ad targeting or credit checking, or any other use. Thus, in order for DNA information to be useful for marketing purposes, the marketing company has to collect it themselves (which gets us back to the example of receiving a better credit card offer if you send back a cheek swab).
While I'm a huge believer in individual freedom and responsibility, I think that taking advantage of people's ignorance in order to get them to give up such a personal piece of information would be wrong, and this issue needs to really be discussed at a regulatory level. Should companies be allowed to collect DNA for their own, non-medical purposes? I think that's a very, very important question.
Plus, if VISA or other companies were to start collecting DNA, they then are responsible for managing protected medical information, correct?
Right, and I have to believe that this would be administratively problematic for them.
But, there is already a company where you can do a cheek swab and get a very nice print of basically an electrophoresis of your DNA. It's art. That's not really a medical purpose, but you are sending your DNA to them. Should that be allowed?
My opinion is that, first and foremost, no organization outside of healthcare or law enforcement should be allowed access to DNA information without the originator explicitly and with "informed consent” providing the DNA to that organization. (Note I didn't use the word "owner" -- there's been some cases where researchers have taken and patented DNA snips out of people, and the case law seems to support those patents, shutting out the individual from which that DNA came).
So draw a bead on exactly why DNA data collection is different than any other personal data collection. People say an awful lot on Facebook and Twitter that is scooped up by data gatherers.
To bring it back to my world of text analytics, there would be a very, very large difference between watching what someone says on twitter and pulling DNA off of the coffee cup they just threw in the trash. In one case, you are talking in public, in a public forum with no reasonable expectation of privacy. In the other, we do not expect our innermost medical secrets to be made freely available to anyone who looks for a stray hair in our trash; and we certainly don't expect them to be used to advertise to us.
But, just like people sign up for Facebook applications in order to entertain themselves-- trading all of their contacts and history in order to be entertained--I don't know if you could really prevent people from trading their DNA information for a lower interest rate. Unless, that is, it was made explicitly illegal to do so. And once it's made illegal, doesn't that become a first amendment issue?
I believe that there is a difference between listening to what someone says and having access to DNA information. People can change their mind, say different things. I do so many times a day. But there is something ultimately fundamental about DNA deserving special protections.
Looking forward, what do you think VISA has in mind for this patent?
My suspicion is that the DNA language was added to the patent not because someone has explicit plans to actually do it, but because they wanted to give examples of possibilities -- making the patent as broad as possible to make it more defensible. And I think that they didn't really work through the PR repercussions of doing so.
1. Crammed agendas inspire adults to act like kids waiting for recess.
Conventional agendas usually look like someone is trying to cram as many topics as possible in a one or two day period, because that's exactly what someone is trying to do. This approach hamstrings productivity from the get-go, because everyone looking at the agenda realizes it contains far too much for a group to reasonably accomplish in the given timeframe, and that inspires people to focus on how much time they'll have to endure before making it to the next break. Not a great way to kick off a meeting.
2. The understood subtext of most meetings: “We probably won’t do most of this stuff.”
Everyone who has been to a few long meetings already knows that most of what's discussed will never materialize. And, truth be told, most of it probably shouldn't. Nevertheless, your brain wants an achievement target -- a sense that this labor will not be in vain. If the subtext going in is that the meeting probably won't yield any significant achievements, that's a tough way to get motivated.
3. They’re too long for the wrong reasons.
Full day or two day meetings are simply too long. Our brains will not remain engaged for even half that time, if that. The reason usually given for why the meeting is so long is that "we have a lot to get done." Fair enough, but that rationale will not change the way the human brain works no matter how often it's repeated. Instead, meeting organizers will just feel like they are getting a lot done, but that ain't the genuine article.
4. Perceived dedication to efficiency neuters a team’s productivity.
When brains come together, they can accomplish great things -- but trying to silo a group's efforts into agenda chunks isn't the best way to realize that greatness. People need time to coalesce around an idea, work it like clay, test different ways to animate it. Does that sound like a typical business meeting to you?
5. Little words on slides make Jack a dull boy.
Whenever I see a PowerPoint slide crammed full of as much little text and graphs and whatever, I immediately feel the need for a bathroom break. Bottom line: no one is able to process that much information in the few moments the slide passes by, and no one is even going to try. The brain wants ideas served clearly and with a rewarding reason to pay attention. Anyone who creates incomprehensible slides is wasting everyone's time.
6. Exhaustion spreads like herpes.
Everything mentioned so far feeds into group exhaustion -- a potent psychosocial contagion. All it takes is a couple people to start squirming and getting up for coffee and looking like they'd rather be doing anything but this, and the contagion spreads. Conventional business meetings are essentially petri dishes for the exhaustion virus. (Here, by the way, are some good suggestions for beating brain exhaustion.)
7. Why are we here? Oh yeah, to get ready for the next meeting.
Another big anti-motivator. Our brains are reward-driven organs, and knowing that the follow-on reward for spending all this time in a meeting is to have another meeting is not motivating.
8. The “Parking Lot” (aka, The cemetery of new ideas).
Most conventional meetings have a white board in the corner with the heading "Parking Lot" written across the top. This is the place for ideas, suggestions, questions or anything else that doesn't "fit" the meeting agenda to go for future consideration. Much of what's placed in the parking lot is pointless fodder, but some of it is really good stuff. What happens to that good stuff? Usually, nothing -- yet another major anti-motivator for the achievement-driven brain.
9. It’s the numbers, stupid (or, follow the money, moron).
When everyone knows that the only real reason for the meeting is to figure out how to "make the numbers," creativity is sapped before the first cup of coffee is poured. Structuring meetings around financial performance metrics is not a good way to motivate people. Ideas are motivating, and the development and nurturing of ideas will lead to making the numbers. Conventional meetings almost always have this backwards.
10. Playing nice is boring.
To really get the most out of a brain gathering, you have to let the chips fall. Conventional meetings are strung up with so many artificial pleasantries, it's a little nauseating. People need an opportunity to work the ideas like clay, and if some of the clay gets thrown around the room a few times, that's not so bad. Sacrificing creativity for procedure never gets the job done, no matter how many bagels and scones are available.
Few of us enjoy jobs that allow an afternoon siesta, but we’d probably all be better off if they did--including our employers. According to new research, all we’d really need is a solid 10-minute power nap to boost our focus and productivity.
Researchers tested four nap time spans: 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes (and a control group that didn’t nap). They then tested participants across several benefits for three hours after the nap. Here’s a summary of the results:
The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.
The problem is that naps are awfully hard to cut down to 10 minutes; once you get a little taste, it's tempting to just keep sleeping. But as this and other studies indicate, longer naps are not the best naps. Snooze for just 30 minutes and you fall into sleep inertia, the feeling of grogginess and disorientation that comes with awakening from a deep sleep.
Another thing to remember about naps is that timing is everything. If you nap too late in the day, you'll interfere with your body's circadian rhythm and will probably sleep poorly at night. Best times to nap are mid to late morning or early afternoon.
I recently stopped drinking coffee. Yeah, I know, why would anybody do that? For me it was a combination of health-related reasons, and overall I can say I’m happy I did. If you had asked me a few days after I kicked it, though, I would have told you it was one of the dumbest things I ever even thought of doing – that is, if my head stopped pounding long enough to answer you in a complete sentence.
This radical life adjustment made me curious about caffeine and its effects on the brain, so I did some research. The most surprising thing I found was that caffeine doesn’t really jack up the volume in our brain the way most of us think it does -- the story about how our favorite drug works isn't nearly so straightforward.
First, what caffeine does not do.
Caffeine does not, by itself, make you a super productive, super fast, super talky jitter machine. That venti Café Americano is not the sole reason you’re able to cram 6 hours of work into 45 minutes, or that you’re shockingly charming between the hours of 8 to 11 am.
What caffeine does do is one heck of an impersonation. In your brain, caffeine is the quintessential mimic of a neurochemical called adenosine. Adenosine is produced by neurons throughout the day as they fire, and as more of it is produced, the more your nervous system ratchets down.
Your nervous system monitors adenosine levels through receptors, particularly the A1 receptor that is found in your brain and throughout your body. As the chemical passes through the receptors, your adenosine tab increases until your nervous system pays it off by putting you to sleep.
The remarkable talent of caffeine is to mimic adenosine’s shape and size, and enter the receptors without activating them. The receptors are then effectively blocked by caffeine (in clinical terms, caffeine is an antagonist of the A1 adenosine receptor).
This is important not only because by blocking the receptors caffeine disrupts the nervous system’s monitoring of the adenosine tab, but also because of the players who make an appearance as this is happening. The neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, the brain’s own home-grown stimulants, are freer to do their stimulating work with the adenosine tab on hold, and that’s the effect you feel not long after downing your triple shot skinny mochachino.
In other words, it’s not the caffeine that’s doing the stimulating. Instead, it’s keeping the doors blocked while the real party animals of the brain do what they love to do.
As every good coffee drinker knows, this effect lessens over time. It steadily takes more and more caffeine to achieve the same level of stimulation from your excitatory neurotransmitters. This is the irritating dynamic we all know as “tolerance.”
The reason it seems that coffee and tea became a morning ritual is that caffeine helps fight off the sleepy feelings we’re left with after a night of paying off a full adenosine tab. That’s something our favorite legal drug is quite proficient at doing.
What it’s not so good at doing, though we’d like it to be, is keeping us chugging away no matter how much sleep we miss. For a little while it might seem like caffeine is warding off sleep deprivation, but the effect won’t last. Eventually the nervous system wins (it pays to remember: the house always wins).
Of course, these effects vary depending on many things, including body type, weight and age. For some one cup of coffee will help kick things up; for others it might take three cups. And as mentioned, tolerance of caffeine is a major variable no matter what source you prefer for your drug of choice.
So if you decide to kick the habit, how long will it take to work through withdrawal? That depends on how much caffeine you routinely consume, but for the average two or three-cup a day coffee drinker, expect up to 10 days of symptoms like headaches, fatigue and a general feeling of wanting to shout loudly into peoples' faces.
BBC Future has an excellent piece on the perplexing psychology of hoarding. This is a hot topic in pop media right now, but BBC Future delves into hoarding at a level reality shows can't touch. From the piece:
Question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive?
Answer: By giving it away.
This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have.
This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. The parking space, the pen and the DVDs are probably the same as many others, but they’re special to you. Special because in some way they are yours.
You can see how the endowment effect escalates – how else can you explain the boxes of cassette tapes, shoes or mobile phones that fill several shelves of your room… or even several rooms?
We usually think of con artists in one of a few different categorical ways. The first and most iconic is the charismatic slickster who talks you into a bad deal, or uses sleight of hand to take you -- something like the practiced cons in the movie "The Grifters".
Another is the anonymous con, the sort that runs Nigerian email scams and the like. A more sophisticated version of this con artist is the sort that tricks you into providing personal information, usually through a phishing scam, some of which are quite elaborate (I've received two this week, both much more impressive than earlier versions).
And then there are the more difficult to categorize cons -- and it's these that I'd like to discuss, because they speak to a handicap all of our brains have whether we realize it or not.
Twice within the last couple of years I've been hit by a con that involved a college-age girl approaching me in the parking lot of a grocery store at night, claiming that her car had run out of gas and she didn't have enough money to put a few dollars worth in the tank to get home. I've been approached with similar stories before in other cities, but never this convincingly.
In the first instance, the girl started crying as she spoke and appeared visibly shaken that she was alone at night and didn't know how to get home. She claimed that she had asked a few people at a gas station for help, but the attendants told her that it was against company policy to allow anyone to solicit their customers for money. After asking her a few questions that I thought might uncover a possible con, I became convinced that she was telling the truth and gave her five bucks for gas. She thanked me as if I'd just handed her a million dollar check and walked off in the direction of the gas station where she said someone had helped push her car off the road.
After I loaded my groceries, I decided to drive over to that gas station. As you might now predict, there was no girl, no car, and after I walked in and quizzed the attendants about her story, it became embarrassingly clear that there never had been.
A few months ago I was approached with the exact same con in the parking lot of a different store in a different part of the city. Again, a college-age girl approached me at night with a story about her car running out of gas and "she just needed enough cash to get home." I let the entire con play out because I wanted to see just how similar it was to the first one; remarkably, it was almost as if these girls had attended the same con-class because blow for blow, she nailed every point. This time, however, I smiled when she finished and went back to loading my car. She immediately dropped character and walked off into the dark.
The reason why anyone can be conned, even people who are usually discerning, is that our brains quite easily fall into what's known as the "Trust Trap." The big hurdle for the con artist is not to make you trust them -- it's to convince you that they trust you. Once they succeed, your trust will organically develop, and that's when the con is set.
Each of our brains are guided by a hormone called oxytocin in matters of trust. The hormone works something like an on-off switch, in that we're usually able to determine whether or not trust is warranted in a given situation. Generally that system works well, but when someone games the system by outwardly mimicking trust, thus inducing an oxytocin response on our side of the cerebral fence, we could be on our way to getting taken.
The problem is, how do we know when someone is mimicking trust? If he or she is skilled at doing so, much of the time we don't, so we're faced with the choice of taking a consistently hard line or taking a risk when we think the person might be genuine.
There isn't a right or wrong answer about that (everyone must make their own choices), but being aware of how effective cons work could give you enough of an edge to make the best decision.
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The BPS Research Digest has a terrific piece about research suggesting that humor reduces our resistance to aggressive marketing techniques. As always, BPS's review of the research is trenchant and revealing. From the piece:
Whether it's messages on smartphone Apps or the old fashioned way on billboards, radio and TV, advertisers bombard us relentlessly. Fortunately, our brains have an inbuilt BS-detector that shields us from the onslaught - a mental phenomenon that psychologists call simply "resistance". Ads from dodgy companies, our own pre-existing preferences, and a forewarning of a marketing attack can all marshal greater psychological resistance within us. However, a new study suggests that funny adverts lower our guard, leaving us vulnerable to aggressive marketing.
Madelijn Strick and her team exposed 86 Dutch university students to pictures of 12 foreign peppermint brands, each of which appeared together with one of four types of text: funny; positive but unfunny; distracting neutral (simple maths problems); and non-distracting neutral. Crucially, before they saw the brands and text, half the students were primed to be resistant. They were told that the experiment was being conducted in collaboration with a cunning local supermarket manager who was planning to bombard university students with email and text ads, and that he was even willing to use subliminal messages to make more money.
At the Greater Good website, there's an insightful review of a couple books addressing bullying and ways to prevent it. What I like most about the ideas in this piece is that they have a preemptive flavor, to undermine bullying--including cyber-bullying--before it begins eliciting reactive behaviors. From the piece:
Bullying continues to be a real problem in schools across the United States, garnering a lot of media attention. But bullying occurs outside of the classroom too, beyond the supervision of adults, particularly through online social media, like Facebook, where kids often post comments and pictures in the blink of an eye, without considering the consequences.
According to James Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media and a professor at Stanford Univeristy, parents can and should do more to protect kids from this kind of cyber-bullying. He believes that cyber-bullying has become rampant in part because parents are unsure themselves of what constitutes a valid and acceptable use of technology.
In fact, many parents are less savvy about using the internet than their kids, making it hard for them to keep up with the ever-changing array of options for online connections and creating a situation where supervision can prove difficult.
Megan Erikson, Associate Editor at Big Think, has a well written piece on the mystery of consciousness -- specifically what we know and what we don't. What intrigues me most about this topic is that most of us assume we know much more about consciousness than we do,which is understandable because we are immersed in conscious awareness. Our brain's penchant for availability bias leads us to think we understand more about this mystery than we really do. It's sort of like swimming in the ocean and believing we understand everything about the ocean because we're immersed in it. From the piece:
A funny thing happened with the invention of fMRI imaging. Rather than explaining away the mysteries of human experience, the technology that made it possible to visualize and map brain activity for the first time only further complicated our understanding of how the mind works.
Yes, we can say with an amazing degree of certainty which parts of the brain “light up” during specific events (falling in love, having an orgasm, dealing with money), but the theory that there’s a single area responsible for each of these complex experiences is as outdated as phrenology. Instead, neuroscientists see patterns and associations, correlations and links.
Satisfactory definitions of philosophically loaded concepts like perception and thought remain as elusive as they’ve always been. If physicists can find the “God particle” with a Hadron collider, then why, given their sophisticated tools, have neuroscientists failed to unlock the black box of consciousness?
One day soon, you may be standing next to someone wearing sunglasses at a bus stop and notice that they are staring at you, really staring. Look closely at the glasses and you might find a logo with the name "O2Amp", and if you do, you’ll know that person is trying to “see” your emotions.
That's precisely what a new technology pioneered by 2A1 Labs is designed to do, and it may radically change not only everyday interactions, but also the medical and security industries, to name a few.
DiSalvo: How did you come up with the idea for glasses that “see” emotions?
Changizi: One of my earlier research directions concerned the evolution and design of color vision in primates, including us. I argued in my work and in The Vision Revolution that color vision is for seeing the emotions, moods and health of others -- the blushes, blanches, and other spectral signals we show on our skin.
These spectral changes happen because of the underlying physiology of blood under the skin -- the hemoglobin's concentration varies, as does its level of oxygenation. Our peculiar variety of color vision turns out to be optimally tuned for detecting these blood-grounded spectral signals. (And the primates with color vision turn out to be the ones with naked spots.) In a sense, our eyes evolved to be oximetry-cameras.
The question my 2AI co-director, Tim Barber, and I asked was, Might it be possible to further amplify our perception of these signals? That is, in light of the tight fit between our color vision on the one hand, and skin and blood on the other, can we create passive filter technology that enhances perception of the human spectral signals we give off?
It turns out we can. If we know the signal we're trying to amplify, then we can figure out what parts of the spectrum to reduce or eliminate to make this happen.
Color meanings chart, courtesy of 2AI Labs
So once you narrowed down how to amplify the signal, building the technology into glasses was a no-brainer.
Actually, our research led to three substantially different technologies, all of which have medical applications: A vein-finder, or oxygenation-isolator, that amplifies perception of oxygenation modulations under the skin (and eliminates perception of variations in the concentration of hemoglobin).
A trauma-detector, or hemoglobin-concentration-isolator, that amplifies perception of hemoglobin concentrations under the skin (and eliminates perception of variations in oxygenation).
And a general clinical enhancer, or oxygenation-amplifier, that combines the best features of the first two; it eliminates neither signal (i.e., it retains perception of both variation in Hemoglobin oxygenation and concentration), and only amplifies perception of oxygenation.
Who is the target consumer for the glasses?
The place we're headed first is medical markets. In a sense, what the technology does is make skin more transparent, thereby allowing one to see more directly into the conditions of the blood underneath--to see the veins, the vasculature, subtle erythema, symptoms of cyanosis, and so on. It's a capability our eyes already have to some extent, and medicine has relied upon it for millennia -- and to this day a good share of disease symptomatology mentions the pallor of skin. It has also long been noticed that colorblind doctors have a noticeable handicap, and in some countries you can't go to medical school if you're colorblind. Our technology harnesses and amplifies that natural gift.
There are other significant markets as well, including the security industry.
And, of course, there’s a big market out there for people who will simply want to detect the emotions of others, for whatever reason.
Yes, perhaps the most exciting market is the everyday-wear sunglasses market. Color vision is, after all, for everyday purposes. In particular it is a social sense, connecting us to those around us. When you put on shades, you severely dampen these social signals. But with our O2Amp technology in the shades, although the world overall is shaded, you maintain or even raise your ability to sense those around you.
From my friend Todd Essig's great Forbes blog Managing Mental Wealth comes a piece about research on the effects of watching co-workers get bullied in the office. Managers should especially take note. From the piece:
Those who manage or have any responsibility for the conduct of a group or work unit already know to squash bullying behavior. It’s not the kind of thing you want in your organization. But despite such common practice, new research about the damaging organizational influence of ambient, or secondary, bullying suggests managers just may want to increase their efforts to eliminate bullying completely.
Research about to be published in the July, 2012 issue of Human Relations titled Escaping bullying: The simultaneous impact of individual and unit-level bullying on turnover intentions sampled responses from nurses at 41 different hospital units. The researchers first looked at whether people want to quit their jobs when they themselves are bullied. Then they added an interesting twist. They asked whether people form an intention to quit their job when they are in a work environment in which others are bullied even when they themselves had not been bullied.
Science writer Carl Zimmerman has a great piece in Discover Magazine about the latest in performance-enhancing beverages: Brain Boosting Neuro Drinks. From the piece:
I dig a knife into a cardboard box, slit it open, and lift a plastic bottle of bright red fluid from inside. I set it down on my kitchen table, next to my coffee and eggs. The drink, called NeuroSonic, is labeled with a cartoon silhouette of a head, with a red circle where its brain should be. A jagged line—presumably the trace of an EKG—crosses the circle. And down at the very bottom of the bottle, it reads, “Mental performance in every bottle.”
My office is full of similar boxes: Dream Water (“Dream Responsibly”), Brain Toniq (“The clean and intelligent think drink”), iChill (“helps you relax, reduce stress, sleep better”), and Nawgan (“What to Drink When You Want to Think”). These products contain mixtures of neurotransmitters, hormones, and neuroactive amino acids, but you don’t need a prescription to buy them. I ordered mine on Amazon, and you can even find them in many convenience stores. I unscrew the cap from one of them and take a gulp. NeuroSonic tastes like cherry and aluminum. I wait for my neurons to light up.
The BPS Reserch Digest has an interesting piece about research suggesting that alchohol doesn't just make others seem more attractive, but also makes the drinker think she/he is more attractive. From the piece:
The beer-goggle effect is well-documented - the way that being drunk makes everyone look wonderfully attractive. A new study asks whether the goggles work backwards. Does being drunk affect how we judge our own appeal?
Laurent Bègue and her team asked 19 patrons at a French bar to rate their own attractiveness and to puff into a breathalyser. The two measures correlated - the participants who were more drunk tended to rate themselves as more attractive. But maybe that was nothing to do with the effect of alcohol. Perhaps better-looking people like getting more drunk?
To find out, Bègue and her colleagues conducted a balanced placebo test with 86 Frenchmen. Half drank the equivalent of five to six shots of vodka, and in this group, half were told truthfully the minty lemon drink was alcoholic, whilst the other half were told it was a new, non-alcoholic beverage that tasted like alcohol. The remaining men drank an alcohol-free version of the minty, lemon drink - half of them were told it was alcoholic (alcohol was sprayed on the glass to make this more believable) and half were told truthfully that it was not. After a short break to allow the alcohol to work its effects, they all recorded an advertising message for the fictional beverage company that they'd been told had produced the drink. Right after, they then watched back the film they'd made and rated their own attractiveness.
Great article at BBC Future by Tom Stafford about how the brain evolved to learn, and the crucial role of curiosity in keeping that machine well-oiled. From the article:
The roots of our peculiar curiosity can be linked to a trait of the human species call neoteny. This is a term from evolutionary theory that means the "retention of juvenile characteristics". It means that as a species we are more child-like than other mammals. Being relatively hairless is one physical example. A large brain relative to body size is another. Our lifelong curiosity and playfulness is a behavioural characteristic of neoteny.
Neoteny is a short-cut taken by evolution – a route that brings about a whole bundle of changes in one go, rather than selecting for them one by one. Evolution, by making us a more juvenile species, has made us weaker than our primate cousins, but it has also given us our child's curiosity, our capacity to learn and our deep sense of attachment to each other.
And of course the lifelong capacity to learn is the reason why neoteny has worked so well for our species. Our extended childhood means we can absorb so much more from our environment, including our shared culture. Even in adulthood we can pick up new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking, allowing us to adapt to new circumstances.
Neurogenesis is a wonderful word that means our brains continue to grow new neurons throughout our lifetimes. Not long ago, the brain was thought of as a static hunk of tissue that stopped growing after a neuronal "pruning" period early in our lives.
With time, neuroscience research uncovered two parts of the brain that evidence neurogenesis: the hippocampus, associated with memory formation, and the olfactory bulb, associated with the sense of smell.
Now, a study has uncovered a third part of the brain that, at least in mice, shows positive signs of neurogenesis: the hypothalamus, associated with body temperature, metabolism, sleep, hunger, thirst and a few other critical functions.
The news about this particular form of neurogenesis, however, isn't so wonderful.
Researchers from the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine injected mice with a chemical that incorporates itself into newly dividing cells. They found that the chemical appeared in rapidly proliferating cells called tanycytes in the hypothalamus, and further tests confirmed that the tanycytes specifically produced new neurons and not other types 0f cells.
The research team then wanted to find out what these neurons do, so they studied the new hypothalamus neurons in mice that had been fed a high fat diet since birth. Since the hypothalamus is associated with hunger and metabolism, the team speculated that the neurons may be linked in some way to weight gain. Turns out, they were right.
At a very young age, the mice fed a high fat diet didn't show a difference in neurogenesis from young mice fed a normal diet. But when they became adults, the mice fed a high fat diet showed four times the neurogenesis of the normal mice, and gained significantly more weight and had much higher fat mass.
To make sure that the new neurons were actually correlating with the weight gain, the researchers killed the neurons in some of the mice with focused X-rays. Those mice showed far lower weight gain and body fat than those fed the same high fat diet, and even lower than mice that were more active.
In other words, it's clear that these neurons have a major impact on weight regulation and fat storage in mice -- and it's altogether possible the same holds true for us.
Further tests will have to be conducted to find out if that's the case, but from an evolutionary standpoint it would make sense. Dr. Seth Blackshaw, the lead researcher, comments that hypothalamic neurogenesis may be a mechanism that evolved to help wild animals survive and probably also our ancestors. "Wild animals that find a rich and abundant source of food typically eat as much as possible as these foods are generally rare to find."
But in a culture with an abundance of food, that formerly life-saving advantage can turn into a distinct disadvantage. Blackshaw explains, "In the case of the lab animals and also in people in developed countries who have an almost unlimited access to food, this neurogenesis is not at all beneficial as it potentially encourages unnecessary excessive weight gain and fat storage." In short, our diets may be training our brains to keep us fat.
On the upside, if these findings are confirmed in humans, they may eventually lead to a drug that blocks neurogenesis in the hypothalamus -- but we're a long way from there.
in the chest by would-be assassin John Schrank. Roosevelt not only survived the attempt on his life, but went on to deliver his speech as scheduled. He began by saying,
