Making Topophiles out of Navigational Idiots

I was a FOB graduate student when I heard people all jazzed about something called a "monarch butterfly."  I simply could not understand the hullabaloo.

This was back in the dark ages before Google and Wikipedia and the rest.  One had to talk to people or search for information in the library in order to get questions answered.  I chose the easier route and asked a few people what the deal was with the monarch butterfly.

When they explained it to me, well, I too was jazzed, and I too started talking about it.  And, during my one and only camping experience ever, I even got to see a few of those butterflies.

What is so special about them?  This butterfly migrates. Over thousands of miles.  A tiny butterfly!

We knew little about this remarkable feat until relatively recently, when the Canadian entomologist Frederick Urquhart made his discoveries. After searching for hiding places where his country’s monarchs might be hibernating, and not finding any, he got the brilliant idea of tagging 300,000 butterflies with a number and a request (obviously in minuscule writing) to let him know where the animal had been found. He eventually learned that Canadian monarchs travel all the way to Texas and Mexico. They get there by orienting to the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. In 1976, Urquhart made front-page news with his announcement of an overwintering site in the Mexican mountains. Since then more such sites have been discovered, always at high altitude, each one packed with millions of butterflies.

NPR's Ari Shapiro asks David Barrie, who has authored a book on Supernavigators whether humans have  "innate abilities to navigate the way that other animals do."  To which Barrie says:

Well, I believe we do, but we have to cultivate them. The trouble is that we've been civilized now for a little while, and we've become more and more dependent on technology. You know, 800 or 900 years ago, the magnetic compass came into use, and then we had, you know, the sextant and the chronometer and so on. Now we've got GPS.
GPS is a marvel. I mean, it is an astonishing technological achieve, but our increasing and exclusive reliance on it is turning us into kind of navigational idiots. We're losing the ability to exercise our natural skills. And from my perspective, almost more sadly, we're being more and more cut off from the natural world as a result. We no longer look up from our little glowing screens and observe the world around us. And I think we may discover that this has quite profound implications both for our physical health but also for our spiritual health, too.

There is more and more evidence that ditching GPS is good for our brains:

In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.

Given that such brain research is new, and a smartphone GPS is even newer, there is much yet to be understood:

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

There are plenty of other benefits, big and small, tangible and intangible:

Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world. And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment and love for place.

Aha, I can now call myself a topophile too!

Are you stressed?

As one who has always loved puns, when a younger person recently talked about being stressed, I couldn't help sharing with her a neat word play with "stressed."

It all depended on how one looked at "stressed."  From the last letter to the first, it is nothing but "desserts."

Apparently there is a more serious connection between stressed and desserts--there is a "desire for chocolate and other carbs during tough times."  But why so?

It is all because of one organ. 

No, not that organ; you and your dirty mind!  I am referring to the brain, of course:

Although our brain accounts for just 2 percent of our body weight, the organ consumes half of our daily carbohydrate requirements—and glucose is its most important fuel. Under acute stress the brain requires some 12 percent more energy, leading many to reach for sugary snacks.

But, what if one is chronically stressed, which then makes them eat all the time?

Often the only way out of such eating habits is to leave a permanently stressful environment. So although many tend to be hard on themselves for eating too many sweets or carbs, the reasons behind such craving aren’t always due to a lack of self-control and might require a deeper look into lifestyle and stressful situations—past and present. Once the root cause of stress addressed, eating habits could ultimately resolve themselves.

Eating is not always just about the eating.  And not eating can also cause problems:

If a person craves chocolate in the afternoon, I advise him or her to eat chocolate to stay fit and keep his or her spirits up. That’s because at work people are often stressed and the brain has an increased need for energy. If one doesn’t eat anything, it’s possible the brain will use glucose from the body, intended for fat and muscle cell use, and in turn secrete more stress hormones. Not only does this make one miserable, it can also increase the risk of heart attacks, stroke or depression in the long run. Alternatively, the brain can save on other functions, but that reduces concentration and performance.

Yup, have a dessert if that's what can straighten you up every once in a while.  But, if you are leaning on desserts every time, maybe you need to look at what the stress agents are, and change them for the better.

Blue ketchup?

Like me, you too have surely seen kids reach for blue-colored drinks, right?  The blue colored Gatorade or one of those semi-frozen drinks from the convenience stores, ... And haven't you had kids come to you and extend their tongues out to show you the blue streaks there because they sucked on candies that were blue?

While you are not as regimented as I am, chances are that as adults you don't gravitate towards blue sweets, unlike kids.  Because, you and I are old!  Seriously, because back when we were kids, they didn't have blue sweets for us:

several decades ago, it was a truism in the food industry that you couldn’t sell blue foods, given their rarity in nature. Yet now, shelves bristle with “cool blue” Gatorades and “blue raspberry” Icees. Those associations, he says, were taught—and it helps when the flavor is novel, or indeed invented. Candy and beverages seem particularly amenable to color experimentation, suggests Delwiche. “They are like the evening wear of the food world—not what you wear to the office.” But strange colors have also crept into food marketed to children

Why do kids go for those strange colors?  Simple.  "Learned associations" are less rigid when we are kids.

There is little evidence that color-flavor relationships are hard-wired. We are all born liking sweet things, but we are not born knowing what sweet things look like.

Interesting, right?  We slowly program our brains to associate colors with tastes.  And, once programmed, well, no wonder those blue-crazy kids avoid the green veggies!

“The primary taste cortex is one of the first stops after the tongue,” says Spence. But “even activity there is modulated by your expectations.” Where the thinking used to be, notes Spence, that “all this information comes from outside through our eyes, ears, and tongue and works its way up through the cortical hierarchy, at each stage being condensed, it turns out that there are more pathways going from the inside out.”
The brain acts like a prediction engine: If bright red fruits usually taste sweeter, the next time you eat a fruit that looks bright red a top-down “back projection” might be, as Spence suggests, “constraining the activity earlier in the neural system closer to the outside, to your eye or tongue.”

I am tempted to bring into this discussion the old Hindu philosophical idea of maya. What you think you see is not real, and is an illusion ;)

Are you sure seeing is believing?  Do you really want to have your eyes tell you what you are eating and tasting? ;)

Source

"The art of remembering is the art of thinking."

A few days ago, I was taking a quick walk on campus, after my lunch and prior to my class.  I heard a student yell out my name from the car that was passing by.  I looked at the car.  The driver stopped the vehicle and rolled down the window.

"I didn't expect to see you here, Jessica,"

We talked for a few minutes.  She was one of the more self-motivated and smart students I have met in this university.  It has been six years since she graduated.  I inquired about her sister and her nephew and her husband. "You have a steel-trap mind," she said.

Fortunately, yes.  I pay attention to important things in life, and they register in my memory.  (I know I am setting myself up for the flip side of this: I am bound to insult somebody when I do not remember the details that are important to them, right?)

Apparently remembering is becoming even more challenging for people because of one particular development: Smartphones.  They are hijacking our minds!

Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, "the art of remembering is the art of thinking." Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

But, of course.  Duh!  This is exactly what I have been telling students (and anybody who asks me about this) for a few years now.  In my intuitive understanding, we need to keep working the brain and its memory functions.  However, this is not about memorizing per se.  Just as fluency with the English language is not about memorizing words in the dictionary.  All these help us think, and think clearly.

It gets even worse:

It turns out that we aren't very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though "their own mental capacities" had generated the information, not their devices. "The advent of the 'information age' seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before," the scholars concluded, even though "they may know ever less about the world around them."

You can see how we were ripe for the Russian fake news campaign that gave us the fascist, who turns around and calls all the real news as "fake news."

So, what can you do?  You can read that entire WSJ essay by Nicholas Carr, whom I have cited many times before.  Or, you can do what I have been suggesting for years: Keep that smartphone away from you as much as you can.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won't solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Not only will that help you think clearly, it will also reduce quite a bit of angst that the smartphones give the users.  Because, our brains are wired to be hijacked, and it is our responsibility to protect our brains that can then serve us well:

Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. ...
But even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a "supernormal stimulus," one that can "hijack" attention whenever it is part of our surroundings -- which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can't take our minds off it.

Seriously, have I not been saying and writing these through all these years that you have been listening to me and reading my blog?  You don't remember? ;)

Why the Rockefeller and Bush boys don't play pro football

Of course, it takes skill to play sports; I know it all too well.  But, there is more than mere skill:

[college athletes] who don’t come from dire poverty will in greater and greater numbers choose to do something else with their minds and bodies. Many NFL players began their lives in destitute situations defined by hardship, but many others come to the league from stable, middle-class backgrounds as well. That middle-class player, especially those like Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick who played multiple sports, will become scarce. Meanwhile, as ticket prices rise, we are facing a sport ready to go “full gladiator” as poor people, disproportionately black, damage one another’s brains for wealthy, disproportionately white crowds.

Yep, when I blog like this, you can see that the old commie, leftist, me is very much alive and well.  Tell you what, I am always glad that part of me is alive and well.  If I didn't think about the race and class and gender implications, then I will worry about me.  It is just that I don't like the idea of always, always, viewing the world through a race or class or gender issue.

Anyway, that excerpt is from that old commie rag, for which I always have a soft spot--The Nation.  It is in the context of San Francisco 49er linebacker Chris Borland walking away from gazillions of dollars.

source

He is only 24, and has some years left banging his helmeted head against other plays.  But, that is exactly why he called it quits.

Untold legions suffer from CTE, a brain ailment that affects motor skills, memory and impulse control. Early onset dementia and ALS can result from the kinds of repeated blows to the head that happen on every play of every game. The ignominious history of head injury casualties includes high-profile suicides of Hall of Famers Mike Webster and Junior Seau. It includes Dave Duerson who like Seau put a bullet in his chest instead of his head so his CTE-wracked brain could be studied. It also includes icons of the 1980s like Jim McMahon and Tony Dorsett struggling with basic life-functions. History shows that playing NFL-level-football is like playing Russian Roulette with your future, and Chris Borland decided to do what so few have done and put the gun down. “I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health,” Borland told ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

When the NFL fights a very good fight downplaying the long-term health issues of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE,) Borland makes this compelling point even when talking about "his passion for the “visceral” violence of the sport":

That doesn’t mean football players are pieces of meat. I think the most important people to convey that message to is the football player himself. You’re not a commodity, you’re a person.

I hope that this madness that is called a "sport" is sent to a dark corner as was that other brain-damaging sport of the past--boxing.  The sooner the better.

On the sex organ that controls your life

Ok, I employed the "sex" word to lure you.

This post is not about sex.  Though, I have blogged enough about sex.  About a hermit's penis and monkey sex too.  For that matter, even about vibrators.  Hey perv, don't click on those links--continue reading instead!

So, with the pervs gone, it is now only the really interested reader and me.

Now, you, the reader, are even better informed than this pretentious blogger is and, therefore, you know really well that the brain is the real sex organ.  The down there merely carries out the instructions from the big one up there.

It is time for another full disclosure: this post is not about the brain's role in sex.  Hey, hey, come back.

It is about the brain and food. The brain and obesity.  Yes, yet another post on "Sanitas Per Escam."

When we were kids, our grandmothers always implored us to eat quickly and not to make eating a long-drawn affair.  "Eat quickly and you will be big and strong" they said and we kids would race to claim the championship, for that meal at least.  Grandmothers might have had their own reasons for encouraging this behavior.  Or, perhaps they did notice a correlation between those eating quickly tending to look healthy (which, to them, almost always meant being a tad chubby) versus those who ate slowly being, well, lean and not looking "healthy."

There is a reason for that correlation.  It takes time for the brain to analyze the data it gets from the gut and the bloodstream before it can issue the "stop eating" instructions.  Eating quickly often then means that we end up ingesting quite some quantity before the brain can shut down the intake.  Such an approach meal after meal, day after day, means that before we know it, we end up carrying a few extra pounds.  The "spare tire" as we often referred to in the old country.

Once that fat is stored, it triggers a set of biochemical processes that lead to even more unhealthy outcomes.  While this essay is not about eating quickly versus eating slowly, here is an explanation of what happens after the fat deposits accrue:

What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat?
The more calories we lock away in fat tissue, the fewer there are circulating in the bloodstream to satisfy the body’s requirements. If we look at it this way, it’s a distribution problem: We have an abundance of calories, but they’re in the wrong place. As a result, the body needs to increase its intake. We get hungrier because we’re getting fatter.

We get hungrier because we are getting fatter.  Or, as the essay notes " we overeat because we’re getting fat."  And thus a vicious cycle gets established.

According to this alternative view, factors in the environment have triggered fat cells in our bodies to take in and store excessive amounts of glucose and other calorie-rich compounds. Since fewer calories are available to fuel metabolism, the brain tells the body to increase calorie intake (we feel hungry) and save energy (our metabolism slows down). Eating more solves this problem temporarily but also accelerates weight gain. Cutting calories reverses the weight gain for a short while, making us think we have control over our body weight, but predictably increases hunger and slows metabolism even more.

The essay is, therefore, a discussion on why "diets that rely on consciously reducing calories don’t usually work."

obesity treatment would more appropriately focus on diet quality rather than calorie quantity.
... Addressing the underlying biological drive to overeat may make for a far more practical and effective solution to obesity than counting calories.

Indeed; merely counting calories is pretty darn stupid!  It is all about what we eat and how we eat.  My grandmothers had it half-right by cooking healthy foods.  But, they didn't factor in the role that the brain plays in this.

My grandmothers will be very happy, I bet, that I make and eat stuff like this, though they would have wanted me to eat it quickly ;)

Happiness is what it is. So is unhappiness.

Whenever the context of poverty comes up in my classes, I almost always feel compelled to remind students that poverty and affluence are not the respective synonyms for unhappiness and happiness.  One can expect poor to be unhappy and the rich too can be unhappy. Similarly, one can find happiness among the poor and rich alike.

Extreme, abject, poverty is not what I refer to--a situation in which one is starving, suffering, from a sheer lack of food. That is a terrible condition, indeed.  But, otherwise, happiness is what we make of it.  Despite the best attempts by our brain to dwell on the factors that make us unhappy:

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.

Hmmm ...

The simple idea is that we we all want to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience, love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the brain?

Isn't that the tough challenge!  To find the good things, including happiness, within us.

Calvin explains why it is one heck of a challenge:

So, why does the brain focus on the negative?  Evolutionary training at play here:

As our ancestors evolved, they needed to pass on their genes. And day-to-day threats like predators or natural hazards had more urgency and impact for survival. On the other hand, positive experiences like food, shelter, or mating opportunities, those are good, but if you fail to have one of those good experiences today, as an animal, you would have a chance at one tomorrow. But if that animal or early human failed to avoid that predator today, they could literally die as a result.

Too much to think about?  Well, simply live a good life without messing up with others, and enjoy it. Don't overthink--it is what it is! ;)

Can we ever understand our queer universe?

Richard Dawkins asks:

If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them?

What a tragedy if it turns out that we cannot ever figure this out! The latest issue of the Scientific American raises a question on its cover: "Can we get any smarter?"  I really, really, hope we do, though the article itself argues that we may be limited by the physics of the brain.  Even if there are such severe limitations related to mass, miniaturization within the brain, and energy, I hope the collective intelligence of humans will one day crack the mystery of it all.  When after my life ends might this happen? A few hundred years?  A geologic era?



BTW, the "queer" in Dawkins' talk has nothing to do with homosexuality.  Dawkins is working off a JBS Haldane quote:

[My] own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Super Bowl question: Does Football Have a Future?

Why this question?  All because of one word: concussions.

It is no longer tackle football, but collision football, writes Ben McGrath in the New Yorker..  Collision that involves, and increasingly so, players fast for a big person and unusually big for a fast person. 

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., is the name for a condition that is believed to result from major collisions—or from the accumulation of subconcussions that are nowhere near as noticeable, including those incurred in practice. It was first diagnosed, in 2002, in the brain of the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who died of a heart attack after living out of his truck for a time. It was next diagnosed in one of Webster’s old teammates on the Steelers’ offensive line, Terry Long, who killed himself by drinking antifreeze. Long overlapped, at the end of his career, with Justin Strzelczyk, who was also found to have C.T.E. after he crashed, fatally, into a tanker truck, while driving the wrong way down the New York Thruway.

 Even though the harsh impacts on the health and well being have been known for long, Alan Scwarz of the NY Times is credited as the guy who relentlessly followed up with reports that has forced the NFL, and other sports too, to investigate this issue.  So much so that apparently he is sometimes sarcastically referred to as Alan Brockovich by those who don't like what he is doing.  Here is an example of the long-term effects:

retired N.F.L. players are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis; that the helmet-manufacturing industry is overseen by a volunteer consortium funded largely by helmet manufacturers; and that Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name but suffered from concussion-related trauma instead. (Since 1960, fourteen N.F.L. players have had a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is about twelve more than you would expect from a random population sample.)

And, remember that other sports too have the concussion crisis:

“Hockey, by the way, has a higher incidence of concussions than football,” Dr. Maroon told me. This is true of women’s college hockey, at least, which doesn’t even allow body-checking. (Women, in general, seem substantially more prone to concussions, and explanations vary, from weaker necks to a greater honesty in self-diagnosis.) And in December, 2009, Reggie Fleming, a New York Rangers defenseman in the nineteen-sixties who was known more for his fighting than for his scoring, became the first pro hockey player to be given a diagnosis of C.T.E. Hockey may now have a concussion crisis on its hands, with the N.H.L.’s best and most marketable player, Sidney Crosby, having been blindsided during the sport’s annual Winter Classic; attempting to play again, four days later, he was drilled into the boards, and he hasn’t played since.

So, what are we looking at?  Over at Slate, John Culhane writes:

At least two class action lawsuits by recent players against the league are in preparation. These suits are expected to allege that the league knew, but suppressed, knowledge of the long-term neurological risks of playing football.

There is a good chance, according to Culhane, that the suits will be tossed out.  But, 

Football isn't tennis; it isn't even basketball. It's violent by design. But that doesn't mean the violence and injuries must escalate without end. If the NFL accelerates the proactive approach it's demonstrated lately, the results won't just redound to the benefit of current and former pros. Given the league's prominence and influence, its safety stance could cause a safety dance to break out: Everyone from college and high-school football players to athletes in other contact sports will begin to get the message.

Think about these when you watch two players colliding at the Super Bowl.