July 15, 2009 • 10:59 pm 0
From the NYT: “Surviving the Death Race,” a 24-hour “adventure race through mental and physical Hell” staged in Pittsfield, Vermont.
Filed under: Sports, Play & Games, The Body, Health & Exercise , 24 hour adventure race, 24 hours of hell, adventure race, Death Race, extreme endurance, Marines, mind and body challenge, NYT, Pittsfield, psychology, pushing the limit, Riverside Farm, sports, survival, VT
July 10, 2009 • 5:59 pm 2
As this ScienceDaily article explained a few weeks ago, “Experiment after experiment confirms that a diet on the brink of starvation expands lifespan in mice and many other species.”
Could humans actually benefit from a permanent diet that left them chronicaly deficient of the number of calories to maintain a healthy weight? Many of these studies were conducted with animals (relatively) far-removed from the human species, genetically speaking, such as worms and rats – though speculation on this topic goes back to 2001, when the LA Times wrote a headline supposing that “Low-calorie diet given to mice may be key to longevity in humans.” Many people who have converted to a restricted calorie diet testify to having better cardiovascular health, and have been reported to live longer, than their peers who consume a “regular” amount of calories, but there has yet to be any experimental studies with humans that validate these anecdotes.
Today, however, the journal Science published the results from a much-anticipated longitudinal and experimental study about the health effects of a restricted calorie diet in primates. The title of the article, which can be accessed here, explains the main takeaway: “Caloric restriction delays disease onset and mortality in Rhesus monkeys” (Colman et al.).
The BBC (”Proof Mounts on Restricted Diet“) and LA Times (”Permanent diet may equal longer life“) provide fantastic summaries of the research. From the BBC:
Seventy-six rhesus monkeys were involved in the trial, which began in 1989 and was expanded in 1994.
Half had their diets restricted, half were given free rein at feeding time.
The rate of cancers and cardiovascular disease in dieting animals was less than half of those permitted to eat freely.
While diabetes and problems with glucose regulation were common in monkeys who ate what they wanted, there were no cases in the calorie controlled group.
In addition, while most brains shrink with age, the restricted diet appeared to maintain the volume of the brain at least in some regions.
In particular, the areas associated with movement and memory seemed to be better preserved.
And from the LAT:
“It adds to the evidence piling up that caloric restriction, independent of thinness, is a healthy way to stay alive and healthy longer,” said Susan Roberts of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Less diseases in old age has to be something most everyone wants.”
Is caloric restriction the solution?
“Mild caloric restriction is beneficial to everybody,” said Dr. Luigi Fontana, a medical professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
In his examinations of people who have been practicing caloric restriction for an average of 6 1/2 years, Fontana found their heart function was equivalent to those of people 16 years younger.
Though the regimen sounds grueling, it is hardly a starvation diet, experts said.
It typically begins with an in-depth assessment to determine how many calories an individual needs to consume to maintain a healthy weight. Then that number is shaved by 10% to 30%.
…
Fourteen deaths in the control group were attributable to age-related diseases, compared with five such deaths among the animals that ate 30% fewer calories, according to the study.The rates of cardiovascular disease and pre-cancerous cell growths were twice as high in the control group compared with the reduced-calorie group.
The researchers also noted that although five of the control monkeys became diabetic and 11 were classified as pre-diabetic, all the calorie-restricted animals remained diabetes-free.
Brain scans revealed significantly less atrophy of gray matter in the monkeys that ate less.
They even looked less wrinkled and flabby.
In all, the monkeys on caloric restriction “appear to be biologically younger than the normally fed animals,” the researchers wrote in their report.
The researchers and authors, though, caution against using this study as justification for a dramatic change in human diet. As the BBC article closes,
“Monkeys may be a close relation but there are significant differences which means not everything we see in them can be translated to humans,” said Catherine Collins, spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association.
“And there should be some serious reservations about cutting calories so dramatically, particularly for anyone under the age of 30. Any such diet would need to be very balanced to avoid malnutrition, and it would be a long-term commitment.”
And would a restricted calorie diet mean having to give-up all of our favorite indulgences? Maybe not. Richard Weindruch, senior author of the study, ”has started a company to create drugs that would provide the same health benefits without the need for extreme dieting.”
Note: The NYT had a story on the Rhesus monkey and restricted calorie research a few years ago. It’s also worth a read and can be found here.
Also, New York magazine published a provocative cover story title “The diet to end all diets,” in which one of their writers documents his two-month experiment on an extreme restricted calorie diet. Read “The fast supper” here.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Brain Sciences, People & Society, The Body, Health & Exercise , calorie restriction, CR Diet, CR Way, CRON, CRS, diet, experimental study, extreme diet, fast, fasting, health, J. R. Atwood, Jason Atwood, longevity, low-calorie diet, mortality, nutrition, restricted calorie diet, Rhesus monkey, science, starvation
July 8, 2009 • 1:19 pm 0
Spandex… Spinning… And shameless self-promotion.
I have been teaching indoor cycling/spinning classes for more than five years and am often asked for copies of my workouts and music mixes — spinningmixes.wordpress.com is intended to be a place to share this information.
In recent years, I’ve been posting a new routine every month, and recently published a new workout and music mix for the month of July. Even if you’re not into spinning (which provides a fantastic low-impact, high-intensity cardio workout in a dynamic group environment), I invite you to browse the blog, download some new music, forward the mixes to your athletic-minded friends, and to leave a comment with your own favorite “power songs.”
Power 10 Spinning!
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Sports, Play & Games, The Body, Health & Exercise , best workout songs, gym music, indoor cycling, indoor cycling music, J. R. Atwood, Jason Atwood, music for the gym, music mixes, Power 10 Spinning, Spandex, spin class, spinning, spinning class, spinning mixes, spinning music, spinning songs, spinningmixes, workout music
July 6, 2009 • 3:21 am 0
In “The Triumph of the Random: From banking to baseball, winning streaks owe much to the laws of chance,” Leonard Mlodinow, a teacher of randomness at Caltech, explains the psychology of curious phenomena and why Joe DiMaggio’s “epic 56-game hitting streak” may have been a fluke. (This is one of the best and more interesting articles I have read that explains and applies statistics.)
Also discussed, why looking at a five-year history of a company’s performance is a poor indicatory of an organization’s health (to say nothing of its likelihood of future performance):
Suppose we undertake an analysis of the resources, effort and ability of all the companies in the Fortune 500 and determine that every company has the same 60% chance of success in any given year. If we observe all the companies over a period of five years and the underlying probability of success were reflected in each company’s results, then over the five-year period every company would have three good years.
The mathematics of chance indeed dictate that in this situation the odds of a company having zero, one, two, four or five good years are lower than the odds of having three. Nevertheless it is not likely that a company will have three out of five good years—because there are so many of those misleading outcomes, their combined odds add up to twice the odds of having exactly three. That means that of the 500 companies, two-thirds will experience results that belie their underlying potential. In fact, according to the rules of randomness, nearly 50 of the companies will have a streak of either five good years, or five bad years, even if their corporate capacities were no better or worse than their counterparts’. And so if you judged the companies by their five-year results alone, you would probably over- or underestimate their true value.
Why — if you truly wanted to know which baseball team was superior — you might need to restructure the World Series as a best-of 269-game series:
In sports, the championship contenders are usually pretty evenly matched. But in baseball, even if one assumes that the better team has a lopsided 55/45 edge over the inferior one, the lesser team will win the seven-game World Series 40% of the time. That might seem counterintuitive, but you can look at it as follows. If you play a best-of-one game series, then, by our assumption, the lesser team will win 45% of the time. Playing a longer series will cut down that probability. The problem is that playing a seven-game series only cuts it down to 40%, which isn’t cutting it down by much. What if you demand that the lesser team win no more than 5% of the time—a constraint called statistical significance? The World Series would have to be the best of 269 games, and probably draw an audience the size of that for Olympic curling. Swap baseball for marketing, and you find a mistake often made by marketing departments: assuming that the results of small focus groups reflect a trend in the general population.
And an explanation for our tendency to attribute meaning to random acts:
We find false meaning in the patterns of randomness for good reason: we are animals built to do just that. Suppose, for example, that you sit a subject in front of a light which flashes red twice as often as green, but otherwise without pattern. After the subject watches for a while, you offer the subject a reward for each future flash correctly predicted. What is the best strategy?
A nonhuman animal in this situation will always guess red, the more frequent color. A different strategy is to match your proportion of red and green guesses to the proportion you observed in the past, that is, two reds for every green. If the colors come in some pattern that you can figure out, this strategy will enable you to be right every time. But if the colors come without pattern you will do worse. Most humans try to guess the pattern, and in the process allow themselves to be outsmarted by a rat. (Those trying to time the market lately might wish they had let the rat take charge.) Looking for order in patterns has allowed us to understand the patterns of the universe, and hence to create modern physics and technology; but it also sometimes compels us to submit bids on eBay because we see the face of Jesus in a slice of toast.
***
In “How David Beats Goliath,” the ubiquitous Malcolm Gladwell offers a fascinating explanation of how underdogs have — and can consistently! — triumph over physically superior and more-talented opponents. (Tip to basketball coaches and players: apply a full-court press on defense! Always!) A short excerpt from an absolute “must read!” article about the advantages of rule-breaking:
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
***
My final selection to this week’s selection of articles of interest is a reflection on the idea and role of merit in our education system — and in American society. In “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Aptitude,” Walter Kim asks whether “our merit-based ideas of fairness get us what we deserve?”
All systems that seek to rank human beings according to “merit” will inevitably fall short of fully accounting for what merit consists of in the real world. As such, these systems, like our Constitution, should be subject to to amendment from time to time, since no definition of merit lasts forever.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Brain Sciences, Education & Learning, People & Society, Sports, Play & Games , aptitude, banking, baseball, basketball, Bible, Caltech, David and Goliath, education, fairness, fluke, full-court press, J. R. Atwood, Joe DiMaggio, Leonard Mlodinow, logic, Malcolm Gladwell, merit, patterns, performance, psychology, psychology of success, randomness, sports, statistics, streaks, Walter Kim, World Series
June 18, 2009 • 2:32 am 0
Alex Moskalyuk provides a great summary of one of the most accessible pop psych books on the market, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, by Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin. The authors draw from the fields of social psychology and behavioral economics to ground the “science of persuasion” in some fascinating research.
Among Alex’s summaries are some great tips for waiters looking to increase their take-home pay:
#11) How restaurant mints are a personalized affair. Let’s a say a restaurant provides mints for its customers on the way out. If the amount of tips per week is the baseline for that restaurant, let’s make the waiters include a mint as they give the check to the customer. The tips go up by 3.3%. However, when the waiters offer the mints themselves, prior to signing the check, the tipping amount went up by 14.1%. In yet another experiment, the waiter would present the patrons with 1 mint per guest, then give them the check, then turning around to leave, then, as if remembering something sudden, turning around and giving them yet another mint per guest. Result? 23% increase in tips, as this signaled high amount of personalization.
#31) Verbalization helps interaction. Waiters who repeat customers’ order to them make 70% more in tips than waiters who just say “Okay”. Our mind subconsciously appreciates the effort taken to ensure the things are perfectly right.
Summaries on chapters 29 and 30 were fun and interesting:
#29) Similarities raise the response rate. A person named Cindy Johnson received a survey request by mail from someone named Cynthia Johannson. Someone named John Smith received a survey from Gregory Jordan. The name similarity in the first case (note that it’s just phonetic similarity, none of the names are the same) brought up the response rate to 56% vs. regular 30%.
#30) People like the sound of their name, and that defines their vocation. There are three times as many dentists named Dennis as any other names. Number of Florences living in Florida is disproportionately high, same goes for Louises living in Louisiana.
More here.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Et cetera, People & Society , Alex Moskalyuk, behavioral economics, J. R. Atwood, Jason Atwood, names and occupations, Noah Goldstein, pop psych, psychology, research, science of persuasion, social psychology, Steve Martin
June 5, 2009 • 5:42 am 0
Research indicates exercise primes students for learning
Fit children may have less stress, longer attention spans, better memories and be more prepared to learn, according to recent research. Struggling students who took a physical-education class prior to an algebra class improved their test scores by 20.4%, compared with 3.9% improvement for other students, according to data from an Illinois high school. Click to read “A Fit Body Means a Fit Mind,” an article by Vanessa Richardson published in the June edition of Edutopia magazine that describes the research and science about how physical activity — especially strength and cardio exercises — helps kids to boost their brainpower in schools.
pt,
jra
Filed under: Brain Sciences, Education & Learning, The Body, Health & Exercise , academic achievement, brain, cognitive development, education, Edutopia, exercise, fit body, fit mind, fitness, John Ratey, learning, Naperville high School, PE, PE4Life, physical education, physical fitness, school performance, Vanessa Richardson
June 4, 2009 • 3:25 pm 0
Some of my research is focused on the language used in school and sport setting, and how words have the ability to significantly shape the way we internalize beliefs about ability, and thus, affect our performance. Here is some information about one of the earliest and most influential experimental studies about stereotype threat and athletic performance…
Stone, J., Lynch, C. I., Sjomeling, M., & Darley, J. M. (1999). Stereotype threat effects on black and white athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1213-1227. [Download here]
This summary of the research by Stone et al. comes from ReducingStereotypeThreat.org, an absolutely incredible resource — for academics and the general public alike — that lucidly explains and makes accessible the stereotype threat literature :
In these studies, Black and White undergraduates were asked to complete a task involving golf skills, but the description of the task was varied to create a condition of stereotype threat for each group in one condition. In Experiment 1, participants were led to believe that the task required natural sports ability or required athletic intelligence. Based on culturally-shared stereotypes, these descriptions should introduce stereotype threat for White and Black participants, respectively. In fact, Blacks did perform better on the task when it was described as reflecting natural sports ability than when it was based on athletic intelligence, and Whites showed the opposite pattern. Experiment 2 focused on White participants who completed the task under high (”natural athletic ability”) or low (”sports psychology”) stereotype threat descriptions. Again, White students performed more poorly when the task was believed to reflect natural ability, but this did not occur for students who indicated that athletic performance was unrelated to their self-worth. In addition, task description did not affect students if their attention had been drawn to assessing the quality of the la in which the test was performed, indicating that distraction might undermine stereotype threat. These studies show that stereotype threat is a general phenomenon that can affect performance when a stereotype of poor performance implicates a valued social identity.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Education & Learning, People & Society, Sports, Play & Games , ability, beliefs of ability, black and white athletic performance, mindset, performance, power of language, school, social psychology, sport, stereotype threat, stereotype threat literature, stereotype threat resources, what is stereotype threat
• 1:11 am 0
New York magazine recently published a fantastic piece by Sam Anderson titled, “In Defense of Distraction.”
Anderson plays the role of philosopher, historian, pop social scientist, and futurist as he ruminates about the influence of technology on the wiring of our brains, and on our abilities to engage in meaningful personal relationships. In the article, he imagines the personal computer as the perfect B.F. Skinner box, because of “the variable ratio schedule” of the Internet; shapes the morality debate among scientists about use of neuroenhancers, and explains why some are worried about “species-typical upper bound limits” of cognition; outlines the weaknesses of lifehacking; and, ultimately, explains how to “embrace the poverty of attention.” The science of neuroplasticity and meditation are also explored:
The most promising solution to our attention problem [may also be] the most ancient: meditation. Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts.”) Meditation can make your attention less “sticky,” able to notice images flashing by in such quick succession that regular brains would miss them. It has also been shown to elevate your mood, which can then recursively stoke your attention: Research shows that positive emotions cause your visual field to expand. The brains of Buddhist monks asked to meditate on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion” show instant and remarkable changes: Their left prefrontal cortices (responsible for positive emotions) go into overdrive, they produce gamma waves 30 times more powerful than novice meditators, and their wave activity is coordinated in a way often seen in patients under anesthesia.
Click here to read the article.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Brain Sciences, Education & Learning, People & Society , Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity Disorder, B.F. Skinner, brain, cognition, distraction, focused distraction, J. R. Atwood, Jason Atwood, lifehacking, meditation, mindful Twittering, neuroenhancers, neuroscience, poverty of attention, psychology, Sam Anderson, science, Twitter, variable ratio schedule, Zen
June 3, 2009 • 11:08 pm 0
“Athletics are the front porch of the university. It’s not the most important room in the house, but it is the most visible.”
– Steve Barnes, athletic director at Utah State University, as quoted in a NYT article about growing student resistance across campuses nationwide to increase their fees for athletic programs.
Filed under: Education & Learning, Sports, Play & Games , athletic programs, athletics, athletics and academics, college, college sports, cost of sports, education, fees, sports, sports and school, student athlete, university
May 27, 2009 • 4:00 am 0
One of the most comprehensive and longest longitudinal studies of adult development — certainly of adult American males — is the Harvard Grant Study. Among its findings:
There are “seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically,”
Half of the men studied with at least five of these protective factors were classified as “happy-well” at age 80, and 7.5% percent were classified as “sad-sick.” In contrast, not a single man who had three or fewer of these factors by the age of 50 could be classified as “happy-well” at age 80. And controlling for physical fitness and health, “the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.”
This information comes from Joshua Wolf Shenk’s lengthy and fascinating article for the Atlantic Monthly, titled “What Makes Us Happy?“
What has no bearing on our ability “to work and love as we grow old”? Some surprises: “Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age.”
Also, “Reguar exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than did physical health.”
Fun fact: President John F. Kennedy was a subject in the Grant Study.
More here.
play, think…
J.R. Atwood
Filed under: Brain Sciences, Education & Learning, People & Society, The Body, Health & Exercise , adult development, aging, cholesterol, exercise, happiness, Harvard Grant Study, healthy aging, human development, J. R. Atwood, Jason Atwood, JFK, Joshua Wolf Shenk, longitudinal studies of development, mental health, physical health, protective factors, psychology, What Makes Us Happy
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