Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

If you have any doubt about the wonderful job our brains do, you’ll be won over by this riveting, disturbing and emotional story from Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist and stroke survivor.

‘How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their brains from the inside out?’ she asks.

In this fascinating 18-minute talk from last month she describes the euphoria and misery that accompanied the mental machinations of experiencing a stroke, and of perceiving the world alternately from the 2 sides of her brain – the parallel-processing right brain and the serial-processing leftie.

She speaks with obvious heartfelt conviction of the life-changing wisdom it brought her – the peace, synthesis and joy that’s possible by perceiving life through the right bran.

Technorati Tags: Right brain,left brain,stroke

It’s like a best-of clip show from the world’s greatest telescopes, with the images merged into a seamless spatial panascope (I know there’s no such word, but you get what I mean).

It brings to life our humble place in this spectacular universe and ignites our sense of wonder. You can’t be jaded too long watching this.

If you can, Download this TEDTalk in high-def (recommended!) >>

Otherwise, watch the low-def version below:

There’ll be a free download later this year.

The article reports findings that antidepressants seem to offer no more than a placebo effect, except in the most severely depressed people.

And those severely depressed people respond less to placebos, not more to the drugs.

Reports of subjects’ happiness have been greatly exaggerated

The study involved UK and US researchers and looked at all clinical trials submitted to the FDA for the licensing of the 4 SSRIs with complete datasets:

• Fluoxetine (Prozac)
• Venlafaxine
• Nefazodone
• Paroxetine (Seroxat or Paxil)

The conclusion?

‘Compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression.’

SSRI specialist David Healy of Cardiff University said in an earlier New Scientist article that this latest research confirms suspicions that the effectiveness of these drugs has been exaggerated.

‘Most importantly this new study shows that the people who did respond to the drugs would have responded to placebo, anyway.’

The file drawer problem

The change in mood toward these drugs also reflects the file drawer problem – the results not found in studies that don’t get published.

When Erick Turner of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and his colleagues hunted through the literature they uncovered 23 unpublished studies, of which 22 found negative or questionable effects of antidepressants.

Because such studies don’t find clinically significant results they get relegated to the file drawer and fail to inform the broader picture of effectiveness.

Placebo placabo

There seems little dispute that antidepressants offer a placebo benefit. And to paraphrase The Bard, doesn’t a placebo by any other pharmaceutical name make you feel just as sweet?

David Nutt of Bristol Uni says yes – even a placebo benefit shouldn’t be discounted.

I guess that’s true.
And maybe the pharmaceutical companies could be paid with Monopoly money.

Don’t try this at home

I repeat New Scientist’s warning – if you’re on anti-depressants be sure to consult your doc before taking yourself off them.

Related articles:

• If you weren’t born happy, swap medication for mindset
• Imagine if there were a happiness pill – would you take it?

Image: xianstudio

‘Should I walk instead?’

‘Maybe it’s just around the corner and then I’ll miss it.’

‘But if it’s not around the corner then how long till it gets here?’

If such Shakespearean dilemmas plaque your daily commute, you’ll be relieved to know there’s now a definitive, mathematically sanctioned solution to the bus-catcher’s bind.

New Scientist reports that Scott Kominers and some fellow Harvard mathematicians have come up with a formula for making the choice between waiting and walking – and you don’t even need a calculator.

Happiness life strategy

If neither option is clearly preferable (it doesn’t work if there’s a long wait between buses and a short walk to your destination or vice versa) then the formula says waiting, however vexatious*, is the preferred option.

Of course you can still choose to walk and get there later, but Kominers suggests you’ll save yourself frustration by making this decision pre-bus stop.

So put an end to vacillating and adopt Kominers’s solution. You’ll have a less stressful wait and a more relaxed ride – and you’ll probably be happier when you get where you’re going.

That is, unless you think you should take the train?

*My tip for making the wait less vexatious is to actually do The Bus Stop – simply copy the moves from the video. If nothing else, you’ll likely have the waiting area to yourself.

Image konr4d

I still haven’t gotten over the demise of Borat and Ali G, two characters who brought me great, chunky wads of happiness.

But I think it’s time to mark their passing with a little blog vigil. Two of my passions are science and technology, so this clip where ‘Ali G talks to some geezers about science and techmology (sic)’ seems a fitting farewell.

Even if you aren’t a fan, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better argument for evolution than the one so eloquently made here. And I challenge you not to laugh at the ‘geezers’ as they try to make sense of the yellow enigma that is Ali.

Enough intro. As Ali would say, ‘Can we see the muff please?’

Farewell, yellow-rapper-suited one. Respek.

If you weren’t convinced by the brain distortions in the earlier post The truth may be out there, but it sure ain’t in here, then I challenge you to check out The Same Color Illusion by Edward H. Adelson, Wikipedia and remain convinced that your picture of reality (?!) is accurate.

A and B are exactly the same colour. Yep, it’s true. Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof. (Or scroll to the bottom of this post for another proof.) Essentially, we guage many visual features, like size and colour, by comparing them to other aspects of the immediate environment.

Still not sure what it has to do with happiness?

We think we ‘know’ what’s going on – what people think of us, what we’re capable of, how smart we are or aren’t – and we let ourselves be defined by these beliefs. Illusions like this one bring home the fact that the movie playing 24-7 in our heads is an approximation – and sometimes a downright fabrication – based on whatever is out there.

If our perception and beliefs aren’t always accurate, then why should we make ourselves their prisoner? Why not experiment with the idea that we are smart, capable and happy, despite what we’ve been telling ourselves all these years.

And if we usually tend to focus on worries and fears, we can choose to see this as no more accurate a picture of reality than an optimistic one, and adjust our mentals controls accordingly.

I’m not saying it’s easy to go from grey- to rose-coloured glasses overnight. But realizing you have tinted glasses on is a great start.

It reports on the very latest findings from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, which have been distilled into 10 ways to avoid cancer. It seems these are 10 life changes that could have a real pay-off in terms of reducing the risk of both cancer and heart-disease.

If you find yourself ruminating unproductively on your health concerns then you might like to make a start with just one item from the list.

10 ways to avoid cancer

1. Body Fat
Aim for a body mass index (BMI) of 21 to 23, and avoid weight gain during adulthood.

2. Physical Activity
Aim for 30 to 60 minutes of moderate physical activity, like brisk walking, every day.

3. Junk Food
Avoid sugary drinks and energy-dense fast food.

4. Meat
Eat no more than 500 grams of red meat per week and avoid processed meats.

5. Alcohol
Limit daily intake to one drink for women, two drinks for men. Do not binge drink.

6. Fruit and Vegetables
Eat five portions of non-starchy vegetables each day and limit refined starchy food.

7. Preservatives
Avoid salt-preserved foods. Limit salt intake to 6 grams per day.

8. Dietary Supplements
Avoid them, except in special cases such as folic acid during pregnancy.

9. Breastfeeding
Try to breastfeed for six months.

10. Cancer survivors
Seek professional nutritional advice.

Source: Obesity increases the risk of cancer, by Collin Barras and Linda Geddes. NewScientist.com news service, 31 October 2007.

They’re not all easy – especially breastfeeding if you’re a guy or don’t have a baby.

But focusing on making one change each month could drastically alter your health profile within a year.

Lawton compares the workings of our visual system to ‘a man blundering around in the dark waving around a flickering torch with a very narrow beam’. This is because our eyes continually dart about, processing pretty much nothing in between these fraction-of-a-second fixations.

Even face perception is wonky. When we look at a face we’re biased toward the left side – as processed by the right cerebral hemisphere. We perceive a chimeric face (a composite image with one side neutral and the other smiling) as whatever expression is on the left.

Nor is our hearing system any more reliable. Much of what people say to us is distorted, but we happily fill in the blanks through top-down influence – that is, we use what we know to round out what we hear. Listen for yourself how ‘knowing’ changes hearing.

Not only do the visual and auditory system each perpetrate their own trickery, they can also obscure one another. Sometimes seeing wins – as when the sound ‘ba ba ba ba’ is overridden by seeing someone mouth ‘ba da la va’. At other times sound trumps sight – as when a single flash accompanied by two beeps appears as two flashes.

Okay, so our tools of perception don’t exactly map reality one-to-one. But it gets worse. The information bits we process, however dysfunctionally, are only the bits we notice – and we only notice what’s relevant right now, carelessly filtering out the rest.

We suffer change blindness, can only attend to five or six items at most, completely miss gradual changes (you might need to jiggle the control to see what you missed) and even fail to realize that the person who asked us directions before a pair of door-carrying workmen passed between us is not the person we directed to the post office. If you think it wouldn’t happen to you, try to count the number of passes made by the basketball team wearing white T-shirts.

Lawton also explores how easy it can be to plant a false memory – as was done to Alan Alda (they made him think he’d been a doctor during the Korean War – only kidding! – it was a memory of overeating eggs as a child); and how implicit assumptions can lead to prejudices we don’t even know we have. Or did I just think he did all that?

My 2 cents

The approximations, simplifications and distortions entertainingly highlighted by Lawton are designed to help us navigate all the data we’re exposed to and zero in on what matters most. If we received all the external inputs ‘correctly’, whatever that means, we’d suffer information overload in the truest sense – we just wouldn’t be able to process it. So funky perception is good. Most of the time it gives us what we need.

What’s it got to do with happiness?

Well, it shows we make a lot of stuff up – what we see, what we hear, what we notice, what we completely miss, what we remember. Our perceptions are by no means an exact representation of what’s out there. Given all the filling in and leaving out, it makes sense to recognize the bias in how we perceive the world. Perhaps we can even choose our own bias – one that helps us to be happy rather than one that makes us miserable.

Now let’s take another look at that glass.