Public Health
Why Neuroscience Matters, with Ilya Monosov
Ilya Monosov, Ph.D., invites us to rethink our understanding of the brain — and to wrestle with the implications of how we define “curiosity”.
Still, I didn’t anticipate our conversation would take us to the importance of neuroscience and information seeking for the fate of humanity, or to how achieving an “engineer’s understanding” of the brain could be helpful for those living with mental health challenges like OCD.
“The driving principle is really to get a mechanistic understanding of cognition at the lowest level possible…but the way to get there is through a large amount of exploration. And partly that’s because, I think at this moment, we don’t really know how the brain works.” ~ Ilya Monosov
Ilya Monosov, Ph.D. studies neuronal circuits of motivation, emotion, and learning at the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Choose to be Curious is an independently-produced, weekly half-hour show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life.
Choose to be Curious won the Alliance for Community Media’s Hometown Media Award for best information talk show series in 2021 and Arlington Magazine’s Editor’s Pick for best local podcast in 2020.
What are American’s getting wrong about Health?
By Howard Bloom
Australia has us beat.
When it comes to how long you can expect to live, you’d expect America to come out on top. Far from it.
In a new study of life-expectancy in six English-speaking countries, America does not come in first, second, or even third. We come in last. Dead last.
The new study, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in July. used “the Human Mortality Database, the [World Health Organization’s] WHO Mortality Database and the vital statistics” from what it called the “agencies of six high-income Anglophone countries” to survey longevity trends from 1990 to 2018 zeroing in on what it calls “six high-income Anglophone countries (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand).”
The new study covered roughly half a billion people. And its results were a wake up call for us Americans.
Australian men live 81.5 years on average, and Australian women live 84.5 years. American men live a mere 76.5 years, and American women live 81.5 years. In other words, Australian men outlive American men by five years. That’s a whopping half a decade. And Australian women outlive our women by four full years.
In fact, we are behind Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and way behind the champion, Australia.
What accounts for Australia’s blazing success and our miserable failure?
Australia has what Bernie Sanders calls Healthcare for All and what Australians call Medicare. It has a solid, high-quality health-care system that takes care of every Australian citizen, no matter how rich or poor.
In addition, Australians have lower levels of obesity. Obesity leads to killers like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
What’s more, Australian citizens have a healthier diet, eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
And Australians have a strong social safety net, including cash payments and other forms of support to youth, to parents, and to the elderly. Not to mention public housing, housing support for those outside of public housing, and subsidized in-home care and stays in assisted-care and nursing facilities for elders.
There’s one more little trick. 30% of Australians are immigrants from countries like England, New Zealand, China, and India. And Australia’s immigrants outlive native Australians.
What are we Americans getting wrong?
We are making guns easy to get. Which leads to more than just murders. It leads to people shooting themselves. It leads to suicide.
We are also driving dangerously. We are smoking. We are drinking too much alcohol. And some of us are addicted to opioids.
Can we Americans get out of our longevity crisis and lengthen Americans’ lives? Yes, it can be done.
The Irish have shown how. They’ve lengthened the average lifespan of their men by an astonishing 8.29 years and their women by 6.66 years since 1990. How?
By improving their health care system, clamping down on smoking, increasing highway safety, improving tech infrastructure, lowering corporate tax rates, and attracting foreign companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon to set up headquarters in Ireland. Not to mention bringing in the headquarters of five global drug companies, five global banks, four medical device companies, and a bunch of household-name corporations like PepsiCo, Kraft-Heinz, and Nestle.
Yes, we can lengthen American lives. But it may take a mix of two opposites: capitalism and socialism.
References:
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/14/7/e079365
https://studyfinds.org/americans-dying-younger/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.
What started as a marketing gimmick may have revealed something important about your happiness.
by Howard Bloom
What started as a marketing gimmick may have revealed something important about your happiness.
True Lemon is a product created in Baltimore in 2003 to put the flavor of a lemon slice into a powder that you can pour into your drink. True Lemon is what its creator, David Schleider, calls a “water enhancer.”
To get publicity for True Lemon, the company’s executive vice president of marketing hired a public opinion company called OnePoll to do a survey on whether a drink of water increases your happiness. A totally unlikely idea.
But OnePoll surveyed 2,000 American adults and found “that the average person experiences 57 ‘little things’ that bring them happiness each week.”
According to Studyfinds.org, the website that brought this survey to the light, that means you and I have roughly eight small minutes of happiness each day.
One of those happy little things, according to 36% of the folks responding to the poll, is drinking enough water.
But there’s more. Since 1945, the medical community has recommended that you drink eight glasses of water a day. And the True Lemon poll found that, “Among those who gulped down 10 or more glasses a day, 80% said it was very important to find joy in the small things.”
In other words, 80% of those who drank a lot of water focused on finding tiny joys. But the percentage of water scrooges, folks who drank “less than one glass” of water a day, who thought it was important “to find joy in the small things” was nearly half what it was for heavy water drinkers.
What’s more, twice as many of the heavy water drinkers reported that they were “very happy” as the water Scrooges did.
On top of all that, a whopping 70% of the heavy water drinkers thought of themselves as glass half full types, while 78% of the water Scrooges apparently saw themselves as glass half empty.
But are the results uncovered by this poll for real? Is the poll just a clever way of putting True Lemon’s “water enhancer” on your radar and mine? Or can drinking water really make you happier?
The answer to the happiness question appears to be yes, water can boost your happiness.
Rigorous scientific studies in peer-reviewed journals suggest that going without water during the day can shrink your ability to think, diminish your memory, make you grouchy, and send you into brain fog.
But drinking a substantial amount of water during the day ups your level of a crucial neurotransmitter, serotonin. And serotonin is one of the key hormones of happiness. In fact, serotonin is the chemical that many anti-depressants aim to boost.
And you can boost serotonin by drinking a glass of water.
Drinking water also ups your level of another hormone of happiness, endorphin, your body’s own version of morphine. Endorphin is another joy producer.
In addition, drinking water ups the activity of your sympathetic nervous system, the system that can yank you out of brain fog and put you vigorously in touch with the world around you. And the researchers emphasize that this impact of drinking a glass of water on your sympathetic nervous system is fast.
But that’s not all. Drinking water after you’ve gone without it for a long time can perk up your judgment and your decision making.
To hammer that point home, there’s the study of 23 six and seven year olds in the peer-reviewed journal Appetite titled “Does having a drink make you think?” The answer to the question is yes.
Having a glass of water upped these tykes’ cognitive ability. More specifically, it increased these children’s “visual attention and visual search.”
And most important of all, it increased their happiness.
References:
https://studyfinds.org/key-to-happiness-hydration/
Jordan, J., Shannon, J., Black, B., Ali, Y., Farley, M., Costa, F., Diedrich, A., Robertson, R., Biaggioni, I., & Robertson, D. (2000). The pressor response to water drinking in humans: a sympathetic reflex?. Circulation, 101 5, 504-9. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.101.5.504
Yamamoto, T., Sako, N., & Maeda, S. (2000). Effects of taste stimulation on β-endorphin levels in rat cerebrospinal fluid and plasma. Physiology & Behavior, 69, 345-350. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0031-9384(99)00252-8
Takahashi, H., Motomatsu, T., & Nobunaga, M. (1986). Influences of water deprivation and fasting on hypothalamic, pituitary and plasma opioid peptides and prolactin in rats. Physiology & Behavior, 37, 603-608. https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9384(86)90293-3
Edmonds, Caroline J., and Ben Jeffes. “Does having a drink help you think? 6–7-Year-old children show improvements in cognitive performance from baseline to test after having a drink of water.” Appetite 53, no. 3 (2009): 469-472. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2009.10.002
Richard, Dawn M., Michael A. Dawes, Charles W. Mathias, Ashley Acheson, Nathalie Hill-Kapturczak, and Donald M. Dougherty. “L-tryptophan: basic metabolic functions, behavioral research and therapeutic indications.” International Journal of Tryptophan Research 2 (2009): IJTR-S2129. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.4137/IJTR.S2129
Patsalos, Olivia C., and Volker Thoma. “Water supplementation after dehydration improves judgment and decision-making performance.” Psychological research 84, no. 5 (2020): 1223-1234. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1136-y
https://www.cnet.com/health/mental/heres-why-drinking-water-is-the-key-to-good-mental-health/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV.
One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.
His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American.
For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.
