Bad Moon on the iPhone

By: | October 29, 2018

Last Wednesday, I was driving with a couple of friends. We turned onto a road that runs along the lakeshore and gasped. An enormous orange moon hung low over the lake, the bottom rim nearly kissing the water. It looked impossible. “I wish we could pull over,” one of my passengers said.

I swerved into a parking lot and stopped in front of a boat launch. We leaped out and raised our phones to capture the perfect moon shot. I wanted some record of this glorious orange orb, this floating jack-o-lantern, this magnificent celestial body, this . . . why am I bothering with all these adjectives when I could just SHOW you what I saw?!

Are you not amazed?

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When Is Screen Addiction Actually Addiction?

By: | October 26, 2018

This week, I published a story with NOVA about the relationship between chemical addiction and screen addiction. For those of you who don’t know, screen addiction, internet gaming addiction, or basically any experience you’ve had with a Shonda Rhymes series at 3AM, are vaguely defined psychological conditions that that some experts consider to be addiction.

The story looked at some disturbing research that suggests obsessive viewing of certain computer games, social media, and entertainment can – over time – start to looks a lot like addiction. Especially when it starts at a very young age. In mouse models, there’s even evidence of permanent changes to the brain and a connection with attentional disorders and future addiction to other substances.

Addiction is one of those things where, the more you learn about it, the more terrifying it gets. For instance, some studies suggest it can impede your ability to manage pain in your body and even enjoy chocolate or sex. For years or decades.

And anyone who follows brain science knows that brain plasticity is pretty hip these days. Now we know it lasts way into old age and can do some pretty amazing things. But it’s not unlimited, especially during crucial developmental periods. In fact, there is some evidence that regular teenage drug users lose their plasticity – their ability to create new connections in the brain – which can change the way the brain is wired.

Connections in the brain are a little like roads. And you can only build so many over the landscape. This may account for some cognitive deficits observed in regular drug users. Drug addiction, it seems, may hoard all the roads for itself, which can be devastating for a teen who is building the roads she will use the rest of her life.

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In which I talk myself–and you–into going for a walk

By: | October 25, 2018

A woodcut of lady walking along a garden path in profile

This week, you may have seen the following headline in your feeds: “Not exercising enough is worse for you than smoking and diabetes, study suggests.” For 122,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic, better fitness—as demonstrated by better performance on a treadmill test–strongly predicted longer lives. Because there have been some questions about possible health risks of extreme exercise, the press release and news coverage focused on the health benefits enjoyed by those with the highest levels of fitness: the elite performers. But the study also reinforces many previous studies that show that a little exercise and a little fitness is better than none at all. On average, the “below average” fitness people outlived the “low” fitness people.

Graph showing Patient Survival by Performance Group Log-rank P < .001 for all groups, except elite vs high performers (log-rank P = .002).
From Mandsager, Kyle, et al. “Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing.” JAMA Network Open 1.6 (2018): e183605-e183605.

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Outdoors After Dark

By: | October 24, 2018

DavidKingham_8199741707

This post originally ran on November 11, 2014.

It’s 6 am on an early November morning, and I am tiptoeing up a juniper hillside with a rifle slung over my shoulder. I’m following Adam, my friend and guide, when suddenly he stops. “Listen.”

It’s still completely dark, except for the sea of stars above us, which I gaze up at as I stop and listen to the elk, my mind focused on pinpointing its whereabouts. He’s just west of us, and now we’re sneaking through the darkness toward his call.

If you’re a regular LWON reader, you already know how this story ends, and you also know how my three outings earlier this month fanned my passion for elk hunting. As I tried to explain my new obsession to a friend, I realized that one of the most enjoyable parts of elk hunting was the time I spent outdoors in the dark.

Something magic happens in the woods when the sun goes down. Without sight as a guide, the other senses become more vivid, in the way that I imagine a blind person must become more attuned to sound or touch. The sounds of a forest contain so much information, but these signals can become drowned out among the textures of sight. Tracking elk without vision for reference, I became hyper-aware of the auditory cues all around me. As I focused on locating elk calls, I also noticed an owl hooting in a nearby tree and the sound of a racoon, scurrying through the brush.

I’d never really thought about it before, but some of my fondest memories in the outdoors have happened in the dark. Continue reading →

This is your brain on the word “actually”

By: | October 23, 2018

If you’re familiar with the internet, you know there’s a problem with the word “actually”. After initially gaining recognition in 2012 as “the worst word on the planet”, it quickly rose to an unpopularity stratospheric enough to justify think pieces in The New Republic and The Atlantic. Its ill repute transcends the English language: last year, in an annual contest in the Netherlands, it placed in the Top 10 most irritating words.

Researchers at the Max Planck Center for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen were intrigued, so they subjected the word “actually” to Max Planckian levels of scientific scrutiny it can’t possibly deserve. However, the results of their recently published study provide surprising new insights into why the word drives us so crazy. You might even say the research goes some way to rehabilitating actually’s busted reputation. Continue reading →

Project Purgatory, Or, My Life As a Retriever

By: | October 22, 2018

I’m generally skeptical of the vast majority of things labeled as “self care” these days. Plenty of people have written about this, about how “self care” has become overrun with basic consumerism and aesthetically engineered Instagram posts rather than, you know, actually stuff that helps you care for yourself. So recently, when the The New York Times published a clever little piece asking journalists in their newsroom how they thought about self care, I prepared to roll my eyes. And a lot of the advice in here is certainly eye-roll worthy. But one piece stuck out to me.

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Fellowship: Dispatches from a real-time evolution lab

By: | October 19, 2018

 

Evolution, we are often reminded, conducts itself at a glacial pace. It throws its dice and picks its favorites over thousands of generations—plenty of time, we wearily explain, for a functional eye to develop. By the same slow token, this process, life’s old standby for adapting to new environments, will not be fast enough for most to transform themselves and avoid getting trampled by the oncoming stampede of anthropogenic climate change.

Only that’s not strictly true. Most on this earth are not, in fact, slow evolvers. Given enough food, a generation for many might mean only half an hour or so. Bacteria and other contagious pathogens most certainly will adapt in response not only to climate change but to the species loss that precedes and accompanies it.

There’s a principle known as dilution theory that links species loss with increased infection. It’s very likely that in pushing our fellow beings off the extinction cliff we put targets on our own backs in ways we don’t fully understand.  Continue reading →

Redux: Ask Your Doctor, Much Good It Will Do You

By: | October 18, 2018

Half the people I know are sniffling, hacking, sneezing; and the other half are getting over it. Is it colds? the flu? sinusitis? For the last two weeks, I’ve had something wicked that’s had unfortunate and not entirely related sequelae (I use that word, “sequelae” every chance I get), and when I told the nurse I thought it was flu, she said if it was, I’d be the first one in the state and since I’m not first in anything, bad or good, it must not have been the flu. No matter. I think I’m clawing my way back to normal. This first ran January 21, 2015.

Q:  Oh, you’re a doctor!  Oh good!  I need a doctor.  I had the flu shot but I’ve got the flu anyway.  I feel like roadkill looks.

A:  You do know, don’t you, that since this year’s flu shot is only 23% effective, you had an 89% chance of getting the flu.

Q:  Is that math quite right?  Never mind, regardless of math, I’ve definitely got the flu and I’d put my faith in the flu shot and I’ve been betrayed.  So why, when I got the flu shot, did I still get the flu?

A:  First you have to understand that flu counts as flu only if you show up at a doctor’s office, an emergency room, or a morgue.  Otherwise, you’re on your own and who knows what you’ve got.

Q:  I’ve got the flu.  Would you please just answer my question.  Why did I get the flu? Continue reading →