Science & Fun - Jonathan Graehl

Researchers have shown that meditation produces a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.

Fifteen healthy volunteers (who had never meditated) attended four 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as “focused attention.” This is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

They actually caused people pain after the meditation (or non-meditation). Cool. 

Not that it makes any difference in the result, but I like when they can correlate brain scan differences with outcome differences:

meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is.

The research also showed that meditation increased brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex, which shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals from the body. The more these areas were activated by meditation, the more that pain was reduced.

I didn’t notice what, if anything, they did to control for placebo effects. They should also test whether just breathing deeply, without any long meditation practice, explains some of the effect.

Via a popular article quoted by Robin Hanson:

Pooping on a modern sitting toilet is a big part of where hemorrhoids come from, and it can also cause diverticular disease … A 2003 study observed 28 people pooping in three positions: sitting on a high toilet, sitting on a lower one and squatting like they were catchers at a baseball game … Pooping took about a minute less when done squatting and that participants rated the experience as “easier”. In fact, toilets that require you to squat that way have been the standard for most of human history and are still widely used in the non-Western world. …

(or you can just lean forward)

Showering or bathing daily … wreaks havoc on something hilariously called the horny layer. Hot water, soap and abrasive surfaces strip off the horny layer, exposing living cells to the elements. … Damaging this protective layer of skin makes us more susceptible to disease. … Showering doesn’t kill bacteria or other microorganisms, though it does move them around. … For this reason, surgeons in many hospitals are not allowed to shower right before operating. … There are no measurable differences in the number of microorganism colonies a person is host to regardless of how frequently that person showers. … When you shower, use warm or cool water and a mild soap (if at all), and rehydrate the horny layer by rubbing on some moisturizer afterward. …

Right, but people want to feel and smell clean. And cold showers eventually cause weight gain (probably fat) as you adapt. Also, the surgeons claim seems weak. Shower followed by lotion is definitely better than no shower, for surgeons. Also, what’s the increased infection rate given daily hot showers? If it’s small enough, then who cares?

The muscle you’re supposed to use to breathe, your diaphragm, is under your lungs and closer to your belly….

I guess it’s possible to learn to take deeper, slower breaths when sedentary. That might be better (supposedly it decreased blood pressure). When exercising, it should come automatically. It would be good to see more evidence that people ever fail to use their diaphragm, given that breathing is unconscious. It would also be good to see if conscious exaggerated belly movements have a benefit for other reasons that increasing diaphragm-breathing.

Artificial light has pushed our normal bedtime back later and later, and this [natural] segmented sleep has been compressed into a single eight hours. … In a monthlong experiment, healthy subjects were given a long artificial “night” lasting 14 hours. They quickly reverted to the segmented pattern, waking up for an hour or two of “peaceful wakefulness” between two three to five hour stretches. …

Conclusion: don’t worry about it if you wake up and still feel tired. Go back to sleep.

Today, the majority of women in America are still directed to give birth in the “lithotomy” position, an odd pose that consists of lying flat on your back with your feet and legs raised, sometimes in stirrups. … This is pretty much the worst position imaginable to give birth in. … The World Health Organization has called use of the lithotomy position “clearly harmful,” and recommended that it be eliminated. …

Flossing is much more important than brushing. … Brushing twice a day is generally still believed to be the best practice. But you should do it away from mealtimes to give your teeth time to recover from acid wear — ideally, right before you eat or drink anything. … You should use a soft brush and focus on your gums more than your actual teeth. …

Brush before meals if you have acid wear (grooves in enamel), otherwise it’s better to brush after. Without a test for acid wear, I can’t really act with much confidence.

A study used an MRI to measure the spinal disk movement of three groups of people: one sitting, one slouching and one lying back at a 135-degree angle with their feet on the floor. The last group showed the least disk movement. By the way, this reclining position was common during the Roman Empire.

Right. Upright sitting (or slouching) is hard on the spine. Reclining is better. But if you’re using a computer screen, you’ll screw up your neck if you add unsupported reclining without changing your monitors.

David Foster Wallace is a talented writer who killed himself.

I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

He seems to have thought he could be happy if he were only less cynical.

My natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

That’s human nature. We’re naturally geared to be effective, not happy. To really be empathetic requires either honest adherence to a “spiritual” belief system, or successful pleasure-guided experiments in perspective.

It surely costs to empathize too much. And I’d rather keep my own identity than become part of a same-feeling mob. But empathy is a fantastic tool.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

Whatever works. Of course there’s no literal mystical oneness, but if that’s how you describe your favorite feel-good perspective, I understand.

Those who exercise regularly have longer telomeres than those who do not. Folks who perceive themselves as the most stressed have shorter telomeres than those who see themselves as the least.

source.

I’m not clear on what causes what, but shorter telomeres are definitely cause for concern (because they’re at least associated with, if not causing, old-age health problems).

a one hour later start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading test by three percentile points. Since start times may be correlated with other determinants of test scores, I also estimate the effect using only variation in start times within schools over time and find a two percentile point improvement. The effect of start times on academic performance is robust to different specifications and sources of variation. The magnitude of the effect is similar to the difference in test scores for one additional year of parental education.

The impact of later start times on test scores is persistent. Conditional on a high school fixed effect, a one hour later start time in grade eight is associated with an increase in test scores in grade ten similar in magnitude to the increase in grade eight. … The impact of start times is greatest in grade eight (who are more likely to have begun puberty than those in the sixth or seventh grade

With a later school start time, kids will sleep later and better. This is crucial at the onset of puberty. The size of the effect is about 2% (on test scores). It carries forward to later years. It’s unclear how much this harm (which persists years later) is in merely lost learning (that could be made up) as opposed to lasting physical damage.

I was definitely permanently harmed by waking at 5:30am for over a year, to attend daily Mormon bible study (it’s supposed to run through all of high school, to protect us from the bad influences of less-conservative non-Mormon high school peers). I quit the church for other reasons, but in retrospect wish I had quit seminary immediately. I was 11-12 years old at the time and not close to fully grown. Sure, I would sometimes manage to sleep before 11pm, but others aren’t asleep by then, which makes it difficult, and even if they are, I often wanted to do my solitary things more than I wanted to sleep (not looking forward to the next morning, and wanting to prolong the sweet freedom of being awake).

“My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. “Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.”

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

I hope he or others succeed. Article. I need 7-9 hours of sleep daily for best results :(

Apparently that’s what the earth’s surface would look like if there were no tides or currents. Not as spherical as I thought. Naturally we should expect a bulge toward the equator since the Earth rotates, but there’s not as much radial symmetry as I’d imagined. Source

I was a little shocked at how non-ellipsoid the geoid is, so I finally looked it up on Wikipedia:

the geoid is by definition a surface to which the force of gravity is everywhere perpendicular

Pretty straightforward. The point about how the ocean would be if there were no currents is more or less irrelevant. I guess any small change in the surface of the Earth wouldn’t greatly affect the plumb line. It’s also possible that the geoid surface will submerge below actual continents or even ocean floor - the plumb line dictates it. That dented upper left portion in the image must feel like a local hill, gravitationally, when you go over it - that is, I don’t think you can take any image of Earth from space, that has this apparent dented shape (and it’s not just the ocean and atmosphere rounding things out).

How many alien planets have intelligent life now? How many have ever had it? How long does an intelligent species usually survive? How cheap can interstellar travel become, and how hard is it to make the necessary discoveries?

These are all interesting questions that are somewhat constrained by our observations: in the last 50 or so years we’ve been watching, we’ve seen no evidence of lightspeed messages, and, crackpot stories aside, no alien or alien-device visitors. It can’t be the case that intelligent species arise from nearly every one of billions of stars in our galaxy, that last a long time, and discover effective interstellar travel, or we’d have been colonized or visited already (surely not all of them would be cautiously isolationist). The argument that we haven’t recognized any signals isn’t too convincing to me, because efficient use of limited spectrum means that the signal should look like random noise (excessive regularities indicate a wasteful encoding).

I mention this to introduce a cool synthetic (computer model only) experiment that suggests that our planet is extremely fortunately stable in its climate, which of course encourages (like in rainforests) diverse and interdependent species. It’s not a stretch to think that after a radical environmental change, humans would be extinct, but some simpler forms would survive. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that we live in precisely the type of environment that makes intelligent life more likely than usual. In fact, any seemingly-odd coincidence (e.g. that we have a tide-locked moon orbiting us that shows the same hemisphere, give or take, at all times), may be well explained by such an effect (of course, truly meaningless coincidences are possible too).

Three separate tests are investigated: (1) Earth-Moon properties and their effect on obliquity; (2) Individual planet locations and their effect on eccentricity variation; (3) The overall structure of the Solar System and its effect on eccentricity variation. In all three cases, the actual Earth/Solar System has unusually low [large-scale astronomically-caused climate change] frequencies compared to similar alternative systems. All three results are statistically significant at the 5% or better level, and the probability of all three occurring by chance is less than 10^-5

- Testing Anthropic Selection: A Climate Change Example

1 in 10000 isn’t THAT amazing, but it is cool. This doesn’t mean the odds of life in an earth-like planet are 1 in 10000; far from it. It means that we should expect to find similarly stable long-term climate conditions 1 in 10000 times. Also, don’t forget that this is *given* an earth-like planet (we don’t know how exactly how frequent those are in our galaxy etc. - yet).

found via Robin Hanson - the comments so far there don’t really discuss the post; people are just using it as a forum to share their pet views on anthropics

On learning that our solar system is unusually well-suited to developing intelligent life, we should feel less worried about the likelihood of intelligent civilizations failing before they can broadcast for long, or develop interstellar travel+colonization, as suggested by the low apparent frequency of alien visits to us. The less likely intelligent life is to arise, the happier we should be. Advanced aliens are scary. Unlike the movies, we won’t win. I’d hope they are merciful, and able to trust us or contain us without destroying us.

Of course, in some sense “less worried” is meaningless. If there’s not much you can do about a worry, hopefully you weren’t dwelling on it. Most of us probably don’t have the right estimate (and estimate of uncertainty of that estimate) of the likelihood of our civilization imploding, or aliens invading, before we learned of this evidence; if your estimates were vague enough to begin with, then you still won’t have a sharp belief even after many such pieces of suggestive anthropic evidence.

59 Seconds

I’ve finished the book finally (I skipped the chapter on Parenting). Provided you’re willing to be suspicious of each individual recommendation (because psychological studies are often designed and interpreted in a sloppy manner), it’s extremely useful and entertaining.

Personality

A 5 factor model of personality explains pretty well how people describe themselves (it’s ridiculous to think that this captures all of how people really vary, but it’s a start).

It’s hard not to think of high or low levels of some of these as being desirable (for more happiness or success).

Openness represents the degree to which a person seeks and appreciates new, interesting, and unusual experiences.

high=good

Conscientiousness reflects the degree of organization, persistence, and self-discipline to achieve goals.

high=good

Extroversion reflects the need for stimulation from the outside world and other people.

perhaps the only reason I won’t say high=good is because I’ve been low-extrovert in the past. probably high=good. maybe some types of creative art or intellectual accomplishment are most accessible to low-extroverts.

Agreeableness is the degree to which a person cares about others. High scorers are trustworthy, altruistic, kind, affectionate …

high=good. although low=>conned less often

Neuroticism … High scorers are far more prone to worry, have low self-esteem, set unrealistic aspirations, and frequently experience a range of negative emotions, including distress, hostility, and envy.

low=good

Of course, there are some great things that have been accomplished by tortured, unhappy people. So we may benefit from people who aren’t in what I called the “good” direction.

Brain scans have revealed that people scoring low on extroversion have a high pre-set level of arousal. As a result, they avoid situations that further arouse their stimulated brains and are most comfortable when they are engaged in quiet, predictable activities. The exact opposite is true of those who score high on extroversion. Their brains have a much lower pre-set level of arousal, so they have a need for continuous stimulation. Because of this, they enjoy being with other people, risk taking, and impulsive behavior.

“as a result” - questionable. But, cool correlation.

levels of openness are determined, at least to some extent, by birth order.⁵ According to Sulloway’s theory, because younger children haven’t developed the abilities and skills that their older siblings have, they explore novel ways to get their parents’ love and attention, and this, in turn, causes them to develop into more open, creative, unconventional, adventurous, and rebellious people.

He studied biographies of famous people to “prove” his idea - confirmation bias abounds. I’m the oldest and was quite rebellious and creative. But it seems reasonable to me.

hold your right palm up in front of you and look at where your first finger joins the palm of your hand

(index finger)

There will be several creases at that point. Place the zero mark of the ruler on the middle of the bottom crease and measure to the tip of your finger (not your nail) in millimeters. Now repeat exactly the same procedure for your right third finger.

(ring finger)

Wikipedia has a picture that’s be more instructive than the text above.

To find the 2D:4D ratio, divide the length of your first finger by the length of your third finger. Research shows that the average male ratio is about .98, and a ratio of about .94 would be regarded as especially masculine, while a ratio of 1.00 would be viewed as more feminine. For women, the average ratio is about 1.00, and a score of about .98 would be regarded as more masculine …

I had a ratio of .94 in each hand; a female friend had a ratio of 1.02 in her left hand and 0.98 in her right. Different ratios across hands is relatively unusual, but it’s characteristic of (a small sample of) famous comedians (although the trend is in the direction of a larger ratio for the right hand, not the left).

People describe their pets as having similar personalities to themselves. On average, people who owned fish self-described as happiest, dog owners as the most fun to be with (obviously they experience the joy of using their dog as an attention magic in public), cat owners as the most dependable and emotionally sensitive (most cat owners are female?), and reptile owners the most independent (?).

People with bumper stickers are aggressive tailgaters and likely road ragers.

If you lace your fingers together then put one thumb over the other, if your dominant hand’s thumb goes on top, you’re probably left-brain (verbal/analytical) dominant. (I normally am, although I happened to have the other thumb on top at the time I read this).

“Evening people” are more extroverted, noncomforming, intuitive, and impulsive. “Morning people” are more introverted, self-controlled, and eager to please. (as self-identified by when you say you feel best sleeping/waking with no external constraints). I think there are all sorts of confounds (what are you really learning when someone says they would choose to be a morning person? probably that they got used to waking up early for a 8:30-5:30pm job, which tells you a lot about them). In other words, the problems with these questionnaire studies is that you’re learning something about their life, but not necessarily anything fundamental (if their circumstances change, but their fundamental personality doesn’t, their answers will probably change a bit).

Recap of key advice:

Develop the Gratitude Attitude.

Having people list three things that they are grateful for in life or three events that have gone especially well over the past week can significantly increase their level of happiness for about a month. This, in turn, can cause them to be more optimistic about the future and can improve their physical health.

This worked for me.

Be a Giver.

People become much happier after even the smallest acts of kindness. Those who give a few dollars to the needy, buy a small surprise gift for a loved one, donate blood, or help a friend are inclined to experience a fast-acting and significant boost in happiness.

Acting in a way where you feel like you’re taking care of people is rewarding.

Hang a Mirror in Your Kitchen.

Placing a mirror in front of people when they are presented with different food options results in a remarkable 32 percent reduction in their consumption of unhealthy food. Seeing their own reflection makes them more aware of their body and more likely to eat food that is good for them.

Didn’t try this. I don’t have a problem in that area if I don’t buy “pleasure” foods that actually make me feel bad when I overindulge.

Buy a Potted Plant for the Office.

Adding plants to an office results in a 15 percent boost in the number of creative ideas reported by male employees and helps their female counterparts to produce more original solutions to problems. The plants help reduce stress and induce good moods, which, in turn, promote creativity.

I’ve had a plant for ages. I forgot to try adding more.

Touch People Lightly on The Upper Arm.

Lightly touching someone on their upper arm makes them far more likely to agree to a request because the touch is unconsciously perceived as a sign of high status. In one dating study, the touch produced a 20 percent increase in the number of people who accepted an invitation to dance in a nightclub and a 10 percent increase in those who would give their telephone number to a stranger on the street.

I feel good when I do this.

Write About Your Relationship.

Partners who spend a few moments each week committing their deepest thoughts and feelings about their relationship to paper boost the chances that they will stick together by more than 20 percent. Such “expressive writing” results in partners’ using more positive language when they speak to each other, leading to a healthier and happier relationship

If you commit any feelings or thoughts to paper it solidifies them in some way (“I’m the person who said they feel X” will make me feel X more. I’ve become closer to a friend after doing this, but we were already really close.

Deal with Potential Liars by Closing Your Eyes and Asking for an E-mail.

The most reliable cues to lying are in the words that people use, with liars tending to lack detail, use more “ums” and “ahs,” and avoid self-references (“me,” “mine,” “I”). In addition, people are about 20 percent less likely to lie in an e-mail than in a telephone call, because their words are on record and so are more likely to come back and haunt them.

Some people are excellent liars and are quite specific, fast-talking, and confident. I guess this is good for detecting mostly-honest people making an uncharacteristic fib. But I like the tip about email for suspected expert liars.

Praise Children’s Effort over Their Ability.

Praising a child’s effort rather than their ability (“Well done. You must have tried very hard”) encourages them to try regardless of the consequences, therefore sidestepping fear of failure. This, in turn, makes them especially likely to attempt challenging problems, find these problems enjoyable, and try to solve them on their own time.

I didn’t read this chapter (I don’t plan on being a parent any time soon), but that seems smart.

Visualize Yourself Doing, Not Achieving.

People who visualize themselves taking the practical steps needed to achieve their goals are far more likely to succeed than those who simply fantasize about their dreams becoming 

a reality. One especially effective technique involves adopting a third-person perspective: those who visualize themselves as others see them are about 20 percent more successful than those who adopt a first-person point of view.

Cool. I forgot to try this. My dad says he likes to think of himself as he’s being perceived (physically) when he interacts with people. That’s a special and unusual type of multitasking. Perhaps becoming comfortable with that leads to more confidence. I don’t know whether this really helps with long term goals, but I guess this advice is backed by (sloppy and then loosely interpreted) actual studies.

Consider Your Legacy.

Asking people to spend just a minute imagining a close friend standing up at their funeral and reflecting on their personal and professional legacy helps them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality.

This seems to be about having a relatively satisfied experience of dying slowly of some disease, assuming you haven’t already lost brain function. I’m not sure that’s what I want to optimize for, but I’ll keep it in mind if I can’t otherwise decide.

This reminds me of people reporting that they took some big risk, starting a company, because someone advised them “20 years from now will you look back and regret not taking that risk?” - but consider the downside: “20 years from now will you look back and wonder what you missed out on because you made that risky choice that ended up really costing you?”.

Artist’s conceit. He’s (intentionally?) misunderstanding the sense in which we’re supposed to weep alone in the conventional saying (“laugh, and the world laughs with you …”). Also, I think we can understand what makes us feel pleasure and well-being, although of course the description of personal sensations is always fraught with uncertainty that the words and images have the same meaning in others.

A brand new paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, extends this link between self-control and anger, even as it complicates the ego-depletion model. In a series of clever studies, the Northwestern psychologists David Gal and Wendy Liu demonstrate that the exertion of self-control doesn’t just make it harder for us to contain our own anger – it also make us more interested in watching anger-themed movies, or thinking about anger-related information, or looking an angry facial expressions. In other words, acts of self-control haven’t just exhausted the ego – they actually seem to have pissed it off.

My favorite experiment involved movies. Two hundred and thirty nine subjects were given a choice between a virtuous apple and a hedonistic chocolate bar. (A slim majority chose the apple.) Then, they were offered a selection of movies to watch, from Anger Management (an anger themed film) to Billy Madison (a non-anger themed film.) Interestingly, students were significantly more likely to choose the angry films if they’d first chosen the apple. And it wasn’t just films: another experiment found that people who exercised financial restraint – they chose a gift certificate for groceries over one for spa services – were more interested in looking at angry faces.

What’s driving this effect? Gal and Liu argue that the preference for angry stuff is not simply a result of ego depletion. Instead, they speculate that self-control is inherently aggravating. Perhaps choosing the apple annoys us because our goals have been thwarted – we really wanted the candy bar – or maybe we’re pissed because we feel that our sense of autonomy has been diminished. (If we weren’t so constrained by societal norms and expectations, we would have gorged on chocolate.) The point is that the labor of self-control directly inspires our tendency towards anger, and not indirectly via a worn down prefrontal cortex.

paper

also, 2007 study

I’ve discussed evidence that self-control is weakly trainable, which is of similar quality. So I’m not inspired (yet) to live a life of soft indulgence alone.

Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, 5209 participants were followed up for 48 years from 1948. The current study however only included participants who were free from pre-existing diseases of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The research showed that for those who had a medium number of years lived with obesity (between five years and 14.9 years), the risk of mortality more than doubled than for those who had never been obese. The risk of mortality almost tripled for those with the longest duration of obesity (more than 15 years). Furthermore, the research showed for every additional two years lived with obesity, the risk of mortality increased by between six and seven per cent

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/mu-tlw032011.php

Of course this is correlation, but I’ll weakly bet that it’s causal. Even briefly being extremely fat means you’re more likely to die (for the rest of your life). You have something like a permanent 100% increase in relative mortality risk (how likely you are to drop dead each day) if you’re fat for 7 years (but then lose the weight). After that, it’s more like 4% per year you stay fat. I don’t know how quickly the risk concentrates in the first year of getting fat, but it’s probably front-loaded. I also don’t know if yo-yo fattening/defattening is worse.

You should never get fat. Another reason not to, is that fat cells are hormonally active, and don’t retire when you lose weight; they just become less full of lipds (like an empty balloon). Supposedly an empty fat cell creates roughly as much hunger as a full one. (I don’t remember the evidence for this, but I believe it).

Disclaimer: I don’t mean stay model-skinny. Just don’t get fat.

Let the Right One In was an excellent book, and a good foreign film. Matt Reeves rewrote it as Let Me In. It’s been several months since I saw the foreign version, but this one seems significantly better constructed for the screen - I wasn’t surprised to hear that the director is the same as the (re)writer.

Some cumbersome (for film) elements were pruned or reworked, but it’s actually slightly longer due to some slow pacing. It’s dark and beautiful. Both versions are worth watching, but the story does lose impact when you see everything coming. My first exposure, the book, was the most moving.

There’s a little bit of awkwardly animated CG footage. Yes, strong little things can move quickly, but I didn’t like the overall effect.

Alcohol fends off old-age dementia and Alzheimer’s (maybe) - yet another piece of weak evidence for making alcohol part of your daily routine (I’ve discussed other evidence before).

I don’t find the case strong enough for anything but old-age drinking, since there are definitely immediate harms (that I’ve personally noticed: short-term mental impairment, and reduced sleep quality).

If you’re old and have fun people to hang out and get moderately drunk with, then go for it - even though there’s no direct evidence that it will help, correlation suggests that it might (alternatively or additionally, you might see similar benefits from frequenting a coffee shop with people who are willing to chat).

I sleep plenty. 7-9 hours per night (I used to sleep more when I was younger, except for a disastrous 1.5 years plagued by Mormon seminary).

“Sleep spindles predict learning refreshment,” said Matthew Walker, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “A lot of that spindle-rich sleep is occurring the second half of the night, so if you sleep six hours or less, you are shortchanging yourself. You will have fewer spindles, and you might not be able to learn as much,” said Bryce Mander, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/as-we-sleep-speedy-brain-waves-boost-our-ability-to-learn

Maybe. Or if you sleep less, maybe the sleep spindles become more densely packed per hour of shut-eye, just like REM sleep. I do agree that you should expect to lose out in a big way on 6 hours/night of sleep, though (even for one night).

After a brief affair enabled by an RSS reader, I’ve been skipping news as much as possible, especially political news. I haven’t missed it. I’ve even cut out blogs with quality thinking and writing if they mostly just react to current news stories.

I mention this because of a recent anti-news screed. It’s full of unsourced assertions, but I sympathize: Avoid News.

A long-running study of ~1500 “gifted” (high IQ test) people suggests that a lot of what’s believed about long-lived people is false. The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study seems to be based on trustworthy data (even though the original researcher, now dead, was interested for reasons now-shameful eugenic hopes, he has a reputation for honest analysis of his data). Here’s the press release “MYTHS EXPLODED!” summary of the book:

Myth No. 1. Thinking happy thoughts reduces stress and leads to a longer life.

Reality:In the study, children whose parents described them as “extraordinarily cheerful and optimistic,” “never sees the dark side” or “never worries” were less likely to live to an old age. This is one of “the biggest bombshells of the project,” the researchers write.

“We keep hearing this advice to cheer up and stay happy because it will keep you healthy,” Friedman says. “We just disagree with that after seeing the results of the study.”

The participants who lived long, happy lives “were not cynical rebels and loners” but accomplished people who were satisfied with their lives. Many knew that worrying is sometimes a good thing. The authors also looked at a study of Medicare patients that found that “neuroticism was health-protective.”

People think this mostly because excessive stress is known to be extremely unhealthy. But moderate amounts of (reasonable) worry my have benefits that outweigh the health cost, or as far as I know, it could even be unhealthy to have too-low stress as well.

Myth No. 2. Gardening and walking aren’t enough to keep you healthy.

The authors say the government’s guidelines that recommend spending 30 minutes at least four times a week expending energy at a moderate to intense level is “good up-to-date medical advice but poor practical advice.”

Reality:Being active in middle age was most important to health and longevity in the study. But rather than vow to do something to get in shape (like jogging) and then hate it and not stick with it, find something you like to do.

“We looked at those who stayed active,” Friedman says. “It wasn’t the kids on sports teams. It’s the ones who had activities at one point and had the pattern of keeping them … They were doing stuff that got them out of the chair … whether it was gardening, walking the dog or going to museums.”

I think they mean that a consistent habit of a little physical activity is sufficient for most of the benefits, and that a short-lived enthusiasm for ultra-marathons won’t count for as much as the same work spread out over a larger time.

Myth No. 3. Lighten up; being serious is bad for you.

Reality:One of the best childhood personality predictors of longevity was conscientiousness — “qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist or professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree,” the authors conclude. They say the most obvious reason “is that conscientious people do more things to protect their health and engage in fewer activities that are risky.”

“What characterized the people who thrived is a combination of their own persistence and dependability and the help of other people,” Friedman says. The young adults who were thrifty, persistent, detail-oriented and responsible lived the longest.

I agree with the obvious reason. You should be fun (it’s attractive and satisfying), but also avoid real danger.

Myth No. 4. Take it easy and don’t work so hard. You’ll live longer.

Reality:Those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. Those who moved from job to job without a clear progression were less likely to have long lives than those with increasing responsibilities.

Among participants who were still working in their 70s, the “continually productive men and women lived much longer than the laid-back comrades. … This production orientation mattered more than their social relationships or their sense of happiness or well-being.”

“It wasn’t the happiest or the most relaxed older participants who lived the longest,” the authors write. “It was those who were most engaged in pursuing their goals.”

I think it’s by now accepted folk wisdom that people who feel like they have nothing to live for, don’t live long. The dog in Where the Red Fern Grows who lays down and refuses to eat after her brother dies, etc.

Myth No. 5. Get married and you will live longer.

Reality:The authors looked at the remarried, steadily married (never divorced), divorced and steadily single and found many differences among the groups and between genders.

“We’re able to say that a sexually satisfying and happy marriage is a very good indicator of future health and long life,” but being single for a woman can be just as healthy as being in a marriage, especially if she has other fulfilling social relationships.

The married men in the study lived the longest. Single men outlived remarried men but didn’t live as long as married men. Among women, the number who divorced their husbands and stayed single lived nearly as long as steadily married women.

“Being divorced was much less harmful to a women’s health,” the authors say.

Women live longer and function better at extreme age. So typically the old man is benefiting from the care of his more competent wife. If she leaves him, he’s definitely worse off. I think it’s as simple as that. But it’s also my experience that men stay hurt for longer when a romantic relationship ends.

By the way, intelligence is correlated with health, for at least the reason that most things that damage your health also damage your intelligence. (Intelligence is the sum of very many small things, genetic and expressed, functioning properly).

More from the excellent 59 Seconds:

Excessive levels of stress are known to be extremely damaging (see the canonical survey: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers).

Defusing anger

Acting on anger doesn’t reduce anger (short term). It primes more anger. People were more cruel to innocents after being allowed to “vent” by wailing on a boxing bag with a picture of someone they hated.

Finding benefits (“silver lining”) to misfortunes definitely makes people feel better. It also makes you more likely to forgive. As sad as it seems to engage in biased thinking, it might be worth it for the health benefits, if you don’t have the will or way to exact revenge instead (I’m sure that’s also satisfying, but you’ll have a hard time finding psychologists wanting to show *that* in an experiment).

Example benefits - whatever you’re fuming about may also have helped you:

• grow stronger or become aware of personal strengths that you didn’t realize you had?

• appreciate certain aspects of your life more than before?

• become a wiser person?

• enhance important relationships or end bad ones?

• become more skilled at communicating your feelings?

• bolster your confidence?

• develop into a more compassionate or forgiving person?

• repair and strengthen your relationship with a person who hurt you?

• identify any of your own shortcomings that may stand in the way of your happiness?

Stress-reduction

Praying for others (probably generalizes to spending time imagining/wanting good things for those you love) seems to defuse your own stress and worries. Probably by means of comparing your problems to others’, but perhaps also by some general positive-mood boosting that comes from caring. Or it could always be the magical power of prayer, I suppose :)

Classical music (at least, baroque) decreases blood pressure where nothing, pop, and jazz don’t.

If the weather is nice, spend 30 minutes outside in the sun. Mood and memory will improve. (because of walking, because of sun, because of seeing people, or because of scene? no idea why. probably sun.)

Use humor to cope with stress. Expose yourself to things that make you smile/laugh.

Dogs

When treated with dog ownership (i.e. intervention, not correlation), blood pressure decreases. Dogs are more effective than blood pressure drugs. People with a dog and spouse performed better in the presence of their dog than their spouse. Possible mechanisms: daily walking, emotional attachment, silent “listener”, petting=happiness, socializing w/ people because your dog attracts them. Except for scary dogs, people will smile and chat more if you have one, than if you carry a teddy bear or plant.

Cats also made people less depressed but didn’t give the same mood-boosting effect as dogs. This inclines me to believe that socializing with humans is one of the most likely mechanisms behind the dog treatment.

Correlation: cat owners are more likely to die in the year following a heart attack. Dog owners are more likely to live (maybe not causation).

Females sitting with a dog get more passerby-attention in a park than those blowing bubbles or watching TV.

Seniors in retirement homes with a robot toy dog (AIBO) had their loneliness treated as well as by a real dog.

Videos of cute animals help people relax.

Alcohol

I’ve noted before that many studies show that drinkers live longer, and that it may even be causal (many, but not all, alternate correlated causes have been controlled for). One of the strongest uncontrolled-for confounds is that people who drink more tend to socialize more, which is known to be extremely health-promoting.

Further, part of the stress, insecurity, and inhibition reduction behind drinking is pure placebo effect and priming. A control group given placebo alcoholic groups at a bar showed similar (negative) drunk-markers as those given real alcohol. Presumably some of the positive ones hold as well (it’s well known that most uses of modern drugs are effective mainly as a placebo; the difference between traditional and modern medicine is that the modern procedure is sometimes actually necessary and effective beyond placebo).

Exercise

It helps if you believe exercise helps.

Hotel employees who clean rooms get a decent amount of exercise. Telling them how many calories various activities burned caused them to lose weight (without making them report exercising more outside of their job, or changing dietary/drug habits). This is somewhat mysterious, but for sure they identified (compared to the control group) with being people who had all sorts of healthy exercise in their life, which either boosted their spontaneous physical activity (at job or otherwise), or otherwise acted as a powerful placebo medication promoting weight loss and lowered blood pressure (often considered a proxy for stress). It probably made them feel slightly better about their job.

So, you can make a list of time spent on average in various calorie-burning everyday activities. That might help you feel better about your life, or somehow derive more actual exercise benefits in your usual routine. e.g. walking, biking, housework, shopping, reading, sitting (yes, this burns calories; even sleeping does), sex, driving, talking on the phone, showering, standing, playing, etc (all of these are in the range of 1-10 cal/minute)

Press release science:

Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in

Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst—psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.

Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder—the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.

The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.

“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.

Bolded part seems to control somewhat against merely more-hydrated => patience.

Perhaps it will become illegal to use all genetic information to set insurance premiums. As a first step, England’s court has ruled that insurers can’t use sex to set prices.

Daniel@Crooked Timber makes an amusing point about the largest financial consequence:

Because it costs more to give women a retirement income, you can basically choose two options from the following three:

1) Equal retirement incomes for women and men
2) Equal commitment of society’s resources to providing retirement savings for women and men
3) A functioning pension annuity industry

(He’s talking about anuities which give a fixed (inflation adjusted?) yearly income until death; retired women live longer on average)

As far as private savings are concerned, if sex discrimination in setting annuity prices is illegal, eventually only women will purchase them. Adverse selection (insurers aren’t allowed to “know” your sex).