Have the Baby Boomers Ruined Society?

Introduction.

The author is a young energetic historian who has entertaining and insightful ideas. His exuberance on occasion leads him astray, he can be too pessimistic, and he should be more cautious in his prophesizing. I should make such a criticism, in my early 20's I came to the conclusion that society would fall off a cliff a few decades after I had died. I might die tonight. It is going to be a close call because present indications are I have many years left in this decaying container. 

An Interesting and Counterintuitive video about Cancer

 I found this an intriguing perspective on cancer. There are many interesting concepts explored in this video. 

(1) Systemic thinking about cancer | Miscellaneous | Heatlh & Medicine | Khan Academy - YouTube

New Treatment Possibility for Parkinson's.

 Scientists uncover new targets for treating Parkinson's disease (medicalxpress.com)

Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have found that people with Parkinson's disease have a clear "genetic signature" of the disease in their memory T cells. The scientists hope that targeting these genes may open the door to new Parkinson's treatments and diagnostics.

Meditation reduces errors?

 How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes

Meditating just once proves to make a difference

The title of the news item expresses much more confidence in the ability of meditation to reduce error than the actual study ... 

On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring

 Most notably, the unexpected nature of our results (i.e., inconsistency with our a priori hypotheses) in conjunction with the small effect size of the reported Pe modulation and lack of behavioral performance discrepancies across groups challenge the strength of our findings and cast doubt over the postulations advanced above. Such skepticism is compounded by our EEG methodology,

I'm struggling to believe that just 20 minutes of meditation can have a real world effect on error monitoring. The results in Table 2 are not that pronounced so I am surprised to read in the news article:

These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain's ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes," Moser said. "It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there in the moment."

That is even more surprising given the paragraph above states there was no improvement in actual task performance!

Of course ... more research is needed. Unfortunately so much meditation research is poorly funded, has conflicts of interest(meditation teachers being involved) and even the participants in the study might have self selection issues because of the all the publicity about meditation over recent years. 

I get it, I'm sounding cynical about meditation. I'm not. I advise many people to try meditation because meditation is like antidepressants: when it works for someone it works well. So give it a go but I'd advise to treat it as a very individual matter. Joining groups, seeing teachers(as if one needs to be taught how to meditate!), doesn't seem necessary to me but then I've always been something of an autodidact and a loner so keep that in mind. 

In my youth I joined a meditation group near home. It was a beautiful inner city Buddhist temple. I stopped going when after one meditation session the participants started discussing "big spiritual dreams". At that point I knew it was time to leave but I continued meditating until something happened. I still don't know what that was but my memory improved and and found concentration much easier. However I was practicing what back then was referred to as zazen, or concentration meditation. Today the trend is towards open monitoring meditation which is about observing without interference or reflection the ebb and flow of sensations. Whatever rocks your boat. Try it and see if it works for you. It seemed to help me. 

 

Einstein's Learning Style

How Einstein Learned Physics

 He was very good at maths at home but at Uni he was average, though scored well in physics classes. The attitude of Einstein displayed in this essay reminds me of a story about another brilliant man who would fall asleep during presentations. His reason being he was only interested in his problems, not other peoples' problems. Einstein demonstrated the most common quality in genius: sustained focus. Which reminds me of the story about a famous golfer playing at St. Andrews and is about to make an important shot when a train goes by. He makes the shot and someone asks him if the train distracted him. What train? he replied. Hmmm, what was that about focus, I'll go back to watching TV now. 

Climbing Mount Virtue

What is racial invisibility, and how do white people benefit from it? | Luke Pearson for IndigenousX | The Guardian

The Guardian publishes virtual signaling articles with monotonous regularity. The editor needs to offer  advice to the virtue signaling authors that the subtle and not so subtle demonising of "white people" is discriminatory because white people is a ridiculous category. 

We are not statistics.

 Diets: how scientists discovered that one size doesn’t fit all

Scientists and doctors have always known this. Their error has been to never sufficiently emphasize that. The consequence being the general public is left with the impression that the dietary advice they receive is based on science when it is based on statistics. That has been big lie of so much dietary advice and I am surprised they have persisted with it for so long. Even for participants in a study the results of that study may not be applicable to them. We have to treat ourselves as individuals and unfortunately that requires considerable work to determine what works best for our bodies. 

The best advice I ever received from a doctor is "listen to your body". I did, and it told me that no matter how hard I try will always carry some extra weight and the pay off is that I can quickly pile on muscle. 

It's obvious that we don't share a common physiology. Some people can eat high caloric foods and then there are people like me who can spend one day of indulgence and see the weight scale spike. I can also spend one week going to the gym and see the gains whereas I have known other people train for weeks with what I would consider pitiful gains. 

For any given food, some people’s glucose levels would spike dramatically, while others hardly seemed to react at all. This couldn’t be explained away as a random fluctuation because the same person responded similarly each time they ate that particular food. For one middle-aged woman, for example, her blood glucose level spiked every time she ate tomatoes. Another person spiked especially strongly after eating bananas.

That is very surprising. Even the macronutrient source independent of caloric content can cause changes in blood sugar. That is a very interesting finding. So we would choose our calories wisely. It might explain something that happens to me after I have been fasting. I will start feeling fatigued and by far the best pick me is eating an orange. The effect is immediate. Perhaps that explains why I have always loved oranges. 

 

The Gym Grey

 Recently a new gym opened near my home. I had just starting gym training again at another gym but because this new gym was closer to home and at my preferred shopping centre I decided changing gyms might boost my motivation. Well that was the excuse but the new gym had a special deal going which meant lower subscriptions and no sign up fee which certainly encouraged the change. Another big advantage of a new gym is low membership. It is working out well because I never have to wait to use a machine, there isn't a lot of talking within earshot, and having sub-clinical ADHD the lack of distraction keeps me focused. 

A Face for the Faces We Meet

 The Neurocognitive Basis of Bias Against People Who Look Different

Summary: Neuroimaging revealed when people saw an anomalous face, the fusiform gyri and amygdala showed significant neural responses. Activity in a region of the left amygdala, which correlated with less pro-social responses to the anomalous face, appeared to relate to the participant’s belief about justice in the world and their degree of empathetic concern.

The neuroimaging findings are consistent with a mountain of literature finding that facial disfigurement has many negative consequences. I've been sitting on this for weeks letting various ideas float through my mind during the interminable hours of insomnia. 

Red Ginseng and Cancer

 

A new effect of red ginseng: suppression of lung cancer metastasis