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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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20 Feb 2023
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How to (Finally) Put an End to Pointless Arguments

Count me as a Buster Benson fan. His 2016 Cognitive bias cheat sheet is legendary among behavioral designers. I have a framed print out of his codex in my home and I’ve enjoyed his writing on various topics for years. He has extensive experience building products that move people at Slack, Twitter, and Habit Labs.

With the release of his new book, Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement, I suspect many more people are about to become Buster Benson fans. His book is a beautifully written and illuminating look into why we so often fight with the people we love. It’s a guide for productive disagreement. Benson argues that conflict need not be unpleasant and if done right, can lead to greater understanding and cooperation.

Could there be a more timely and needed book for our disagreeable times?

Nir Eyal: Why did you write your book?

Buster Benson: TLDR; I wrote this book to learn how to survive today’s world without going insane.

I’ve been working in tech at places like Amazon, Twitter, and Slack, as well as a few of my own startups, for over 20 years. I’ve always been drawn to this question of how can we change ourselves for the better, because I sincerely believe that the only way to change the world for the better is to start with ourselves.

2016 was a big turning point for me, and for a lot of people. I had always suspected that the world’s steady march towards progress was a bit bumpy, but was at least guaranteed to trend upward. It was easy to cite high level stats like literacy rates, poverty rates, unemployment, having basic needs met, etc, to show that the world was getting better even if it kept feeling worse. But it’s now becoming obvious to more and more of us that there are some other pretty dark threads weaving into our timeline that we would be unwise to ignore (I also feel ashamed about not spotting some of these much earlier, as a willfully blind member of the privileged class).

Problems like income inequality, mental health, gender and race-based harassment, climate change, and anxiety are all well past boiling over and are even bringing our average life expectancy down in the US. Our political discourse is completely dysfunctional, both in the US and beyond. Our media, broadcast, and social networks are falling on their faces as they attempt to stay ahead of our shifting expectations of them. Things just feel extremely not right on so many levels.

Like many product managers and entrepreneurs in our industry, I’m a fan of looking for root causes of problems rather than settling for the naive answers. The naive answer here is that people are just idiots, and everything is doomed. I can’t resign myself to hatred, cynicism, and futility. I’ve always been interested in taking on the discomfort of learning difficult truths and acknowledging when a blind spot has been hiding something from me. We’re all complicit in the problems around us. The least we can do is to try to use our energy to make things a tiny bit better, rather than worse.

How we argue and how we communicate with people who hold perspectives we find to be deeply wrong seems to me to be at the very heart of many of these problems. We’re arguing at the starting line of so many debates, when we should be racing to fix problems despite differences of opinion. What are we missing in the formula to having more fruitful disagreements?

Most people tell you to write a book about what you know. I’ve had a career that has put me in the middle of resolving disagreements for several decades now, but I have to admit that when I came to this book it wasn’t because I had all the answers, but exactly the opposite: I deeply needed these answers, and didn’t know how or where to find them.

I’ve spent several years reading and trying to understand what many of the experts on the subject had already learned. Pulling from my own past. Running myself through the crucible of disagreements in my own life trying to find the practical tips we can apply to our everyday disagreements across all domains of life. We don’t need new theories, we need new practices that help us have more productive political disagreements, personal disagreements, professional disagreements, and everything in between.

NE: You’ve done some fascinating research. From what you’ve learned, what surprised you the most?

BB: There was a quick cascade of “aha moments” early in my exploration of this topic. I thought my goal was to help people make their unproductive disagreements more productive. But time and again I found that the real problem was that people everywhere are avoiding disagreements entirely.

Many of us have already given up on the idea of the productive disagreement, and think anyone trying to have one is really just trying to trap us in some kind of sales pitch or false promise that will end up being a waste of time. Early on I tried forming a few groups that would discuss topics with lots of moderation to prevent them from going off the rails. Nobody wanted to do this. In hindsight it makes sense… we’re burned out, tired of ranting, and out of ideas.

So much of the book is really an argument against conflict avoidance, rather than an argument against yelling, despite the title. If anything we should be yelling more, because there are very important things to discuss with one another, and our emotions should be invited to the table.

NE: What lessons should people take away from your book regarding how they should design their own behavior or the behavior of others?

BB: I don’t have any “secret keys” in this book, but I do have 8 “things to try” which are the result of pulling together all kinds of experts from a bunch of different fields: cognitive psychology, game theory, communication, behavior change, mindfulness, and more. The 8 things to try include:

1st thing to try: Watch how anxiety sparks

We’ll see how examining our anxieties within disagreements can reveal our strongest values.

2nd thing to try: Talk to your internal voices

We’ve inherited automatic responses to conflict, and we can listen to them without having to always obey the

7th thing to try: Cultivate neutral spaces

Learn why it’s important to invite threatening ideas to the table, and how to do this without endorsing them.

8th thing to try: Accept reality, then participate in it

Denying reality doesn’t make it go away. We can learn to accept that problems exist, so we can participate in their solutions.

 

Each of these is about a small change we can bring to our everyday arguments and doesn’t require you to become fully in control of your emotions, or to become a perfect persuader. In fact, those skills can get in the way.

The real lesson I hope people take away is that we have everything we need to have more productive disagreements… we just need to practice the art more deliberately, and give ourselves and others forgiveness when we fail, and new opportunities to grow. That’s the only way we’ll get a true felt understanding of what a productive disagreement is, and it’s only then that we can begin to expect it of our leaders and elected officials as well.

NE: Writing a book is hard. What do you do when you find yourself distracted or going off track?

BB: I follow the tips in Indistractable of course! I’m not just trying to flatter here. True story: when I read your book, I found more than a few parallels between improving our ability to stay on track with the art of productive disagreement.

The first step is always to notice the first trigger — perhaps this comes from our shared background in behavior change, but both of us talk a lot about that initial spark of anxiety that causes us to run a habitual program in our brains. It’s not always possible to notice when this happens, but when I find myself particularly distractable I know that there’s some part of my brain that is trying to do something it considers important.

I start most days with a long walk (from my house to the desk I rent about 2 miles from my house) and this is one of the times when all those distracting thoughts can have space to speak their mind. If that’s not enough I also run 750words.com, which is place to do morning pages and brain dump everything that needs to be dumped out. I’ve found that trying to just shut up those thoughts rarely works. I do what I can to just get them all out, do all those 2-minute tasks that I’ll spend way more time delaying than just doing, and then move on to what I really want to focus on.

NE: What’s one thing you believe that most people would disagree with? 

BB: I have a beliefs file that I’ve kept for 7ish years: There are all kinds of things in there that I’m sure most people would disagree with. If I trotted all of them out here, people would seriously reconsider buying a book from a complete crazy person, but I’ve tried to defend a couple in various venues like changeaview.com and letter.wiki (two of my favorite sites on the internet). Here’s a fun one: We are better understood as a collection of minds in a single body rather than as having only one mind per body.

NE: What’s your most important good habit or routine?

BB: I have a bunch that I feel have helped me tremendously throughout life, like private journaling, having a very low bar for reading self-help books (and not feeling bad if I don’t finish them), and being okay with drinking lots of coffee and staying up too late.

The one I feel has contributed most to my well-being in the long term is gonna sound weird, but it’s “talking to myself kindly and directly”. The habit of viewing self-critical thoughts as “feedback” rather than “truth” has (at least in my confabulated narrative of the self) improved my ability to learn from every mistake and misfortune in a way that has had pretty solid compound effects over time. I consider this skill to be different from plain overconfidence.

The difference is that I don’t have a louder voice in my head saying that everything I do is always good and right, but rather have some way to hear my thoughts as you might hear an untrustworthy narrator during a movie. It’s always worthwhile to get a second opinion (usually from someone else’s head).

NE: Are you working changing any bad habits?

BB: Yeah, always. Right now I’m trying to avoid eating too many hamburgers, because I love them so much, and yet tend to gain an extra 10-15 pounds if I do this too often. I recently took up intermittent fasting (with a 12pm-8pm eating window) and it has helped a lot. When noon comes around, I’m just as hungry for a giant salad as I am for a hamburger.

NE: What one product or service has helped you build a healthy habit?

BB: Zero, for the intermittent fasting angle.

NE: What’s the most important takeaway you want people to remember after reading your book?

BB: Once you’re introduced to the art of productive disagreement, start practicing. Don’t start with the hardest disagreement first… think of it like the onboarding to a new game or sport, find some easy ones to calibrate your comfort level, then as they get easier stretch to more difficult ones. Conversation and disagreement is one of the oldest social skills we have… we’re remarkably equipped to find flow in a conversation once you start to look for it and notice it.

To find flow, get to know your own strengths and weaknesses, and when you find an opportunity to hop into a conversation that will push you a little past your comfort zone, that’s your opportunity to grow. Be kind to yourself if it takes a little longer, or feels a little harder than you thought at first. Learn what you can from the interaction and try again.

It won’t always work out. That’s the reality we have to accept, and the sooner we do the sooner we’ll be able to get 1% or 5% or 10% better at having productive disagreements. The fruit of productive disagreement compounds faster than almost any other investment we can make.

 

 

Original article here

11 Feb 2023
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Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are ‘Illusions’

 

 

This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?

Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

But why is entanglement related to space and time? And how can it be important for future physics breakthroughs? Properly understood, entanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics that its underlying reality is described in terms of waves, and a monistic universe would require a universal function. Already decades ago, researchers such as Hugh Everett and Dieter Zeh showed how our daily-life reality can emerge out of such a universal quantum-mechanical description. But only now are researchers such as Leonard Susskind or Sean Carroll developing ideas on how this hidden quantum reality might explain not only matter but also the fabric of space and time.

Entanglement is much more than just another weird quantum phenomenon. It is the acting principle behind both why quantum mechanics merges the world into one and why we experience this fundamental unity as many separate objects. At the same time, entanglement is the reason why we seem to live in a classical reality. It is—quite literally—the glue and creator of worlds. Entanglement applies to objects comprising two or more components and describes what happens when the quantum principle that “everything that can happen actually happens” is applied to such composed objects. Accordingly, an entangled state is the superposition of all possible combinations that the components of a composed object can be in to produce the same overall result. It is again the wavy nature of the quantum domain that can help to illustrate how entanglement actually works.

Picture a perfectly calm, glassy sea on a windless day. Now ask yourself, how can such a plane be produced by overlaying two individual wave patterns? One possibility is that superimposing two completely flat surfaces results again in a completely level outcome. But another possibility that might produce a flat surface is if two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle were to be superimposed on one another, so that the wave crests of one pattern annihilate the wave troughs of the other one and vice versa. If we just observed the glassy ocean, regarding it as the result of two swells combined, there would be no way for us to find out about the patterns of the individual swells. What sounds perfectly ordinary when we talk about waves has the most bizarre consequences when applied to competing realities. If your neighbor told you she had two cats, one live cat and a dead one, this would imply that either the first cat or the second one is dead and that the remaining cat, respectively, is alive—it would be a strange and morbid way of describing one’s pets, and you may not know which one of them is the lucky one, but you would get the neighbor’s drift. Not so in the quantum world. In quantum mechanics, the very same statement implies that the two cats are merged in a superposition of cases, including the first cat being alive and the second one dead and the first cat being dead while the second one lives, but also possibilities where both cats are half alive and half dead, or the first cat is one-third alive, while the second feline adds the missing two-thirds of life. In a quantum pair of cats, the fates and conditions of the individual animals get dissolved entirely in the state of the whole. Likewise, in a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”

 

I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”

— Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study

 

Quantum entanglement reveals to us a vast and entirely new territory to explore. It defines a new foundation of science and turns our quest for a theory of everything upside down—to build on quantum cosmology rather than on particle physics or string theory. But how realistic is it for physicists to pursue such an approach? Surprisingly, it is not just realistic—they are actually doing it already. Researchers at the forefront of quantum gravity have started to rethink space-time as a consequence of entanglement. An increasing number of scientists have come to ground their research in the nonseparability of the universe. Hopes are high that by following this approach they may finally come to grasp what space and time, deep down at the foundation, really are.

Whether space is stitched together by entanglement, physics is described by abstract objects beyond space and time or the space of possibilities represented by Everett’s universal wave function, or everything in the universe is traced back to a single quantum object—all these ideas share a distinct monistic flavor. At present it is hard to judge which of these ideas will inform the future of physics and which will eventually disappear. What’s interesting is that while originally ideas were often developed in the context of string theory, they seem to have outgrown string theory, and strings play no role anymore in the most recent research. A common thread now seems to be that space and time are not considered fundamental anymore. Contemporary physics doesn’t start with space and time to continue with things placed in this preexisting background. Instead, space and time themselves are considered products of a more fundamental projector reality. Nathan Seiberg, a leading string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, is not alone in his sentiment when he states, “I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” Moreover, in most scenarios proposing emergent space-times, entanglement plays the fundamental role. As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).” Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.

Conversely, from the perspective of quantum monism, such mind-boggling consequences of quantum gravity are not far off. Already in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space is no static stage anymore; rather it is sourced by matter’s masses and energy. Much like the German philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz’s view, it describes the relative order of things. If now, according to quantum monism, there is only one thing left, there is nothing left to arrange or order and eventually no longer a need for the concept of space on this most fundamental level of description. It is “the One,” a single quantum universe that gives rise to space, time, and matter.

“GR=QM,” Leonard Susskind claimed boldly in an open letter to researchers in quantum information science: general relativity is nothing but quantum mechanics—a hundred-year-old theory that has been applied extremely successfully to all sorts of things but never really entirely understood. As Sean Carroll has pointed out, “Maybe it was a mistake to quantize gravity, and space-time was lurking in quantum mechanics all along.” For the future, “rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics. Or, more accurately but less evocatively, ‘find gravity inside quantum mechanics,’” Carroll suggests on his blog. Indeed, it seems that if quantum mechanics had been taken seriously from the beginning, if it had been understood as a theory that isn’t happening in space and time but within a more fundamental projector reality, many of the dead ends in the exploration of quantum gravity could have been avoided. If we had approved the monistic implications of quantum mechanics—the heritage of a three-thousand-year-old philosophy that was embraced in antiquity, persecuted in the Middle Ages, revived in the Renaissance, and tampered with in Romanticism—as early as Everett and Zeh had pointed them out rather than sticking to the influential quantum pioneer Niels Bohr’s pragmatic interpretation that reduced quantum mechanics to a tool, we would be further on the way to demystifying the foundations of reality.

 

 

Original article here

01 Feb 2023
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How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius

There is an interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist and creative genius, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes.

As the story goes, Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman spotted him. She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

“My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.”

Picasso isn’t the only creative genius who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many brilliant creatives.

Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice.

Let’s talk about why that is, and even more important, how you can reveal your own creative genius.

The Age of Most Nobel Prize Winners

A recent study tracked the ages of Nobel Prize winners, great inventors, and scientists. As you can see in the graph below, the researchers found that most groundbreaking work peaked during the late thirties — at least a full decade into any individual career. Even in the fields of science and math, creative breakthroughs often require ten years or more or work.

 

 

 

These findings match the work done by previous researchers as well.

For example, a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University by cognitive psychology professor John Hayes found that out of 500 famous musical pieces, nearly all of them were created after year 10 of the composer’s career. In later studies, Hayes found similar patterns with poets and painters. He began referring to this period hard work and little recognition as the “ten years of silence.”

Whether you are a composer or a scientist, creativity is not a quality you are born with or without. It is something that is discovered, honed, and improved through real work.

Which brings us to an important question: How can you do your best work and discover your hidden creative genius?

Permission to Create Junk

“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts… For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. If fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

In any creative endeavor, you have to give yourself permission to create junk. There is no way around it. Sometimes you have to write 4 terrible pages just to discover that you wrote one good sentence in the second paragraph of the third page.

Creating something useful and compelling is like being a gold miner. You have to sift through pounds of dirt and rock and silt just to find a speck of gold in the middle of it all. Bits and pieces of genius will find their way to you, if you give yourself permission to let the muse flow.

Create on a Schedule 

Amateurs create when they feel inspired. Professionals create on a schedule.

No single act will uncover more creative genius than forcing yourself to create consistently. Practicing your craft over and over is the only way to become decent at it. The person who sits around theorizing about what a best-selling book looks like will never write it. Meanwhile, the writer who shows up every day and puts their butt in the chair and their hands on the keyboard — they are learning how to do the work.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

— Chuck Close

Ira Glass is the host of the popular radio show This American Life, which is broadcast to 1.7 million listeners each week. This is the advice Glass gives to anyone looking to interesting, creative work: “The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that … the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

If you want to do your best creative work, then don’t leave it up to choice. Don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I hope I feel inspired to create something today.” You need to take the decision-making out of it. Set a schedule for your work. Creative genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.

Finish Something

Steven Pressfield’s most famous work, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was a best-selling novel that became a major motion picture starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron. But if you ask Pressfield, he will say that his most important book is one that you never heard of: the first book he finished.

Here’s how Pressfield describes finishing his first novel…

“I never did find a buyer for the book. Or the next one, either. It was ten years before I got the first check for something I had written and ten more before a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was actually published. But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was so epochal. I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath.”

Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.

There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.

Practice Self-Compassion 

Everyone struggles to create great art. Even great artists.

When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in my mouth.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Anyone who creates something on a consistent basis will begin to judge their own work. I write new articles every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that publishing schedule for three months, I began to judge everything I created. I was convinced that I had gone through every decent idea I had available. My most popular article came 8 months later.

It is natural to judge your work. It is natural to feel disappointed that your creation isn’t as wonderful as you hoped it would be, or that you’re not getting any better at your craft. But the key is to not let your discontent prevent you from continuing to do the work.

You have to practice enough self-compassion to not let self-judgment take over. Sure, you care about your work, but don’t get so serious about it that you can’t laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love. Don’t let judgment prevent delivery.

Share Your Work

Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable to creating your best work. It will provide feedback for doing better work. And when you see others connect with what you create, it will inspire you and make you care more.

When it comes to ideas, most people overestimate the risk of piracy, and underestimate the price of obscurity.

— Mike Trap

Sometimes sharing your work means you have to deal with haters and critics. But more often than not, the only thing that happens is that you rally the people who believe the same things you believe, are excited about the same things you are excited about, or who support the work that you believe in — who wouldn’t want that?

The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.

How to Find Your Creative Genius

Finding your creative genius is easy: do the work, finish something, get feedback, find ways to improve, show up again tomorrow. Repeat for ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.

Inspiration only reveals itself after perspiration.

 

 

Original article here

29 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

The Science of How Your Body Ages

Ask people what they think they’ll look like in 25 years, and chances are they’ll mention how their parents looked at that age. And while genetics certainly play a part, research shows there’s more to the story. Only about 30% of what we see as aging is inherited, explains John Rowe, M.D., Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

When you look specifically at things above the neck — like cognitive function, vision, and hearing — that number goes up to about 50%. “People feel there’s some intrinsic clock playing out a program in their body that they don’t have influence over,” says Dr. Rowe. “It’s just not true.”

Yes, good news: We have real control over how our bodies age. Aging is happening on a cellular level at every moment, so for a long and healthy life, it’s vital to stay on top of the changes within your body and your mind. For a better understanding of these shifts through every decade, we talked to the experts.

In Your 20s

In our 20s, we’re generally at the peak of physical health. In several ways, our bodies are still on the upward curve of development — even our menstrual cycles maybe more regular than in our teens! — and our brains and bones are growing to their full potential.

Brain

Your brain is changing well into your 20s, says Shanna Levine, M.D., a New York City–based internist working in private practice for Goals Healthcare. Research has shown that your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for factors like inhibition, high-level functioning, and attention — continues growing until around age 25.

POWER UP: It’s never too early to prioritize brain health! Keep your noggin sharp through the decades with these brain-boosting tricks:

  • Plan to volunteer. One study found that giving back, even for less than two hours a week, could slow cognitive decline — likely because doing so promotes social connection and mental engagement, which research has proven can help stave off dementia.
  • Study a new language. It may be easier to learn one when you’re young, but studying another language at any age can “promote thinking skills, increase mental agility, and delay the aging of the brain,” found one study. Plus, if you take group classes, you get the social benefit.
  • Learn to play an instrument. Even if you don’t see yourself as musically inclined, give it a shot. In one study, people 60 and over showed improvement in cognitive functions after just four months of piano lessons.

Bones

By the time you’re 18, you already have up to 90% of your peak bone mass, including strength and density. However, you’re still adding more mass than you’re losing (that changes around age 30). While the amount you develop is primarily based on set factors like race and gender, about one-quarter of it is determined by things you can control.

POWER UP: Exercise regularly, get enough calcium in your diet (about 1,000 mg per day), limit alcoholic beverages, and don’t smoke.

In Your 30s

Many people see this as their best decade. During our 30s, we’re likely getting more settled in our careers and families, and according to one study our happiness levels are still actively increasing. This is also when making real lifestyle changes can help stave off long-term issues.

Metabolism 

You may notice that it takes extra effort to shed pounds. This is because of a slower metabolic rate — it can start to decline in our 20s and continues to decrease by 2% to 3% every 10 years. The reason you likely won’t realize that until now: This is also when we start losing muscle mass (3% to 8% per decade after age 30). This metabolic shift may translate into an increase in body fat around your middle. While you might be annoyed about how your jeans suddenly fit (or don’t), the deeper belly fat around your organs (called visceral fat) is more of a concern— it can increase your risk of things like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure.

POWER UP: Eat healthfully and start a regular exercise routine; it’ll help build muscle mass, which gives your metabolism a boost.

Skin

Seeing new fine lines and wrinkles in the mirror? You can blame decreasing collagen and elastin levels. And cell turnover slows after your late 20s, so skin can look dull and tired without extra exfoliation. Our Beauty Lab recommends adding a facial peel to your weekly routine. This is also when damage from past unprotected sun exposure can start to rear its ugly head.

POWER UP: Prevent future sun damage by wearing SPF 30 or higher every day — even if you’re not hitting the beach or the pool.

In Your 40s

Everything seems to come together when you hit your 40s. While your family life and career are likely at a high point, caring for aging parents and planning for the future can make it a stressful time.

Eyes

Struggling to read the restaurant menu? Eyesight begins to weaken at this age because of changes in the eyes’ focusing ability. But you won’t see the more profound consequences for two more decades, says Dr. Levine.

POWER UP: Focus on your diet. “Just one cup of kale has more than a whole day’s worth of the carotenoids zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene, which help shield ocular tissue from harmful UV damage and may also reduce your risk of developing cataracts,” says GH Nutrition Director Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D.

Height

“Every 10 years after the age of 40, we lose about half an inch of height” because of changes in bones, muscles, and joints, says Dr. Levine. But talk to your doctor about any rapid height loss — it could be a sign of osteoporosis.

POWER UP: Get exercise. There’s no way to fully stop shrinking, but a study found that people who did so regularly could cut the height they lost almost in half. This was true even for those who became moderately active only after 40 (compared with those who never exercised regularly and those who ended their activity as they got older).

In Your 50s 

As your children head off to high school and college, now is when you think about how you would like to spend your time. Whether you focus on a new hobby, a volunteer project, or a career change, this decade is all about starting to concentrate on your own wants and needs.

Hormones

The big health story during this decade? Menopause. It hits some women in their 40s, but the average age is 51. Menopause is diagnosed when you haven’t had your period for over a year — and when your ovaries stop producing estrogen, the effects can be challenging both physically and emotionally. The classic symptoms include hot flashes, insomnia, mood swings, and even anxiety or depression — but not all women will experience every one of these.

POWER UP: Keep cool! While there hasn’t been much research on supplements and herbal remedies, some women have found that black cohosh eases hot flashes; one study showed that listening to relaxing music or practicing slow-breathing exercises could reduce their frequency. For many women, the end of periods — and cramps, bloating and PMS-ing — is something to celebrate!

In Your 60s

Welcome to a new concept: freedom! Whether it’s thanks to becoming an empty nester, being newly retired, or just shaking off societal expectations, it’s all about you from now on. Here’s to prioritizing your mental and physical well-being!

Hearing and Vision

Along with declining vision, hearing loss is an issue: One-third of Americans in their late 60s and early 70s have hearing loss. And after 75, half of us will have difficulty hearing.

POWER UP: Ask for help, especially since this can be socially isolating. Today’s hearing aids are often more discreet than previous models, so don’t hesitate to talk with your doc about whether you’re a candidate. Only 30% of adults 70 and older who could use them ever have, reports the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Bones

Women are at higher risk of developing osteoporosis (about one-quarter of women age 65 and older in the U.S. suffer from it, versus less than 6% of men) because of rapid loss of bone density during and after menopause.

POWER UP: Take a proactive approach and get screened regularly for bone disease. You can help lower your odds of it by starting an exercise plan with weight-bearing movements (like walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, weight training, and even dancing) and making sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D.

The Future of Aging

Somewhere between early adulthood and middle age, a compound in your cells called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) begins a gradual decline. NAD+ helps power hundreds of metabolic processes and keeps a group of proteins called sirtuins active. You want them to stay active, since they can contribute to overall health and longevity.

Leonard Guarente, Ph.D., director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT and chief scientist and cofounder of Elysium Health, discovered their role and importance. He says sirtuins are the “guardians of health maintenance” in cells.

While experts are able to make some generalizations about growing older, it’s a different experience for everyone. “People are very diverse in terms of their aging rates, and the level that one person hits by age 50, another may not hit until 60,” says Morgan Levine, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine.

Biological Age

This is why many researchers also talk about biological age, a measurement focusing on biological markers that show how your systems are actually aging. “About 68% of people will have a biological age within five years of their chronological age, but you can also find individuals who are 10 years older or younger,” she explains.

You can’t stop aging, of course, but lifestyle choices make a real difference. And research is focusing on what else can be done. “People want to play an active role in their own health maintenance,” says Dr. Guarente. He and his team at Elysium Health are looking to develop a test that will let people find out and monitor their NAD+ levels.

True Age 

The hypothesis is that NAD+ levels are a better measure of aging than chronological age. And in theory, knowing them would help people make profound changes. “Successful aging is not the imitation of youth,” says Dr. Rowe. “Making yourself look better on the outside won’t impact what’s going on inside.” At the end of the day, it’s internal functions that actually matter for our health and life span.

 

 

Original article here

26 Jan 2023
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Who Has Time for Hobbies?

One of the bigger lessons I got from reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, was the importance of scheduling your leisure time.

Scheduling time for hobbies may sound unnecessary. Aren’t those the things you do for fun?

Yet, I would wager that most of us have activities we’d like to do on the side but never seem to have time for:

  • Learning a language
  • Art
  • Sports and activities
  • Reading for fun
  • Creating something

A common way to look at this state of affairs is to argue that we don’t have time for these things because we’re too busy. We want to relax at the end of a hard day, with whatever meager hours are left over.

This idea assumes we mostly use our time wisely, and if there isn’t time for something at the end of the day, it must be because there wasn’t time for it to begin with.

Where Does Your Free Time Really Go?

The view put forth by Newport in his book is that we tend to invest a lot of our time on various, low-value leisure activities that neither give us meaning or much enjoyment. Think television, Netflix, video games, social media and web surfing.

These activities often don’t provide much value, but they have really low barriers to get started. That combined with carefully engineered reward mechanisms keep them occupying our attention for many hours in the day.

In this view, it’s not that we don’t have time for high-quality pastimes because we’re too busy. Rather it’s because the default is to do something less worthwhile. If we could momentarily push ourselves out of these bad habits and onto something else, we’d be happier overall.

The solution is simply to schedule time for activities you care about.

How I’ve Been Applying This Idea 

There’s two ways I’ve been working to integrate this idea more in my own life:

The first is to set strict limits on internet and television use, outside of a few high-quality areas. Right now I have LeechBlock configured on my phone to block my biggest time-wasting websites if I use them more than an thirty minutes per day total. I also have ten minute blocks on my iPhone per day for YouTube and other apps that I mostly use to waste time. 

Thirty minutes per day is still more than enough time to follow everything I care about.

The second way I’ve been trying to integrate this idea is proactively scheduling time for higher-value hobbies. Making a goal to do some activity every evening, Monday to Thursday, whether it’s learning salsa, painting, attending a Chinese language meetup or going to the gym with friends, makes me less likely to fall back into binge-watching old television shows before going to sleep.

 

 

What If You Really Don’t Have Time?

The idea of scheduling hobbies tends to provoke one of two reactions:

The first comes from people who don’t like the idea of putting in effort to have fun. Why should you schedule fun–shouldn’t it be spontaneous?

However, I think the problem is often that there are barriers to starting activities you’d find really meaningful and enjoyable in your life, so the path of least resistance is usually not the most satisfying. Scheduling is just one way to avoid this trap.

The second reaction comes from people who argue they actually don’t have any time for hobbies. They’re truly too busy to do any of those things, since they work eighty hours per week, have seven kids and are studying for a dozen exams.

It’s hard to respond to this second objection because, there really are people in such a situation. You may even be in this situation yourself.

However, I also know that some of the highest-achieving, busiest people I know, nonetheless put in a lot of time in high-quality leisure activities.

Do You Really Lack Time, or Are You Just Stressed and Tired?

This suggests to me that the feeling that you have no time is often a reflexive evaluation about the amount of stress and exhaustion you experience to do the things you have to do in life, rather than an objective assessment about the number of hours per day you have no choice over.

My guess is that for most people in this situation, if you did a timelog, you’d find there’s lots of “wasted” time, and that your self-assessment mostly reflects the fatigue and stress you feel.

However, if it truly is fatigue and stress, rather than genuine lack of time, then that’s all the more reason to invest in high-quality hobbies. It’s the meaningless web surfing and Netflix binging that can make your life feel like a complete grind. Creating, learning, adventuring, socializing and experiencing are ways to reduce that stress and fatigue.

Therefore, paradoxically, I think it’s often the very people who claim they cannot possibly schedule their hobbies that need to do it most.

 

 

Original post here

23 Jan 2023
Comments: 0

Why some people can’t tell left from right

 

It can seem like an almost childish mistake, but a surprising number of adults confuse left from right and scientists are only just starting to understand why.

When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient’s bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column.

Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These “never events” – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right.

While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice.

“Nobody has difficulty in saying [something is] front and back, or top and bottom,” says Ineke van der Ham, professor of neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But telling left from right is different, she says. “It’s because of the symmetry, and because when you turn around, it’s the other way around, and that makes it so confusing.”

Left-right discrimination is actually quite a complex process, calling upon memory, language, visual and spatial processing, and mental rotation. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of exactly what’s going on in our brains when we do it – and why it’s much easier for some people than others.

“Some individuals can tell right from left innately, just can do it without thinking,” says Gerard Gormley, a GP and clinical professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “But others have to go through a process.” In an effort to understand what happens in wrong-sided medical errors, Gormley and his colleagues have conducted research on medical students’ experience of making left-right decisions and examined the process.

“First of all, you have to orient right from left in yourself,” he says. When the answer doesn’t come instantly, participants described various techniques, from making an L shape with their thumb and index finger, to thinking about which hand they use to write, or strum a guitar. “For some people it’s a tattoo on their body or a piercing,” Gormley says.

Then, when figuring out which side is someone else’s left or right, the next step is mentally rotating yourself so you’re facing in the same direction as the other person. “If I’m facing you, my left hand will be opposite your right hand,” says Gormley. “That idea of mentally rotating an object adds an extra degree of complexity.” Other research shows that people tend to find it easier to judge if an image shows a left or right hand by imagining their own hand or body rotating.

Research published by Van der Ham and her colleagues in 2020 found that around 15% of people rate themselves as insufficient when it comes to identifying left and right. Almost half of the four hundred participants in the study said they used a hand-related strategy to identify which is which.

The more asymmetrical someone’s body is – in terms of writing hand preference, for example – the easier they find it to tell left and right apart

The researchers used something called the Bergen right-left discrimination test to dig deeper into how these strategies work. Participants looked at pictures of stick people either facing toward or away from them, with their arms in various positions, and had to identify their highlighted hand as their left or right. “It seems simple, but it’s kind of frustrating if you have to do a hundred of these as quickly as you can,” says Van der Ham.

In the first experiment, the participants sat with their hands on a table in front of them. “There was a very clear effect from how this little stick figure was positioned,” says Van der Ham. “If you were looking at the back of the head, so it was aligned with you, people were a lot faster and more accurate.” Similarly, when the stick person was facing the participant but had their hands crossed, so their left hand was on the same side as the participant’s left hand, people tended to do better.

“That tells us that the body really is involved in this,” says Van der Ham. The next question was whether participants were using cues from their body at the time of the test to identify left and right, or referring to a stored idea of their body instead.

 

To answer that, the researchers repeated their experiment, but this time tested four different scenarios: participants sat with their hands either crossed or uncrossed on the table in front of them, and had their hands either visible during the test, or covered with a black cloth.

But the researchers found that none of those changes influenced test performance. In other words, participants didn’t need to actually see their hands in order to use their own body to distinguish right from left.

“We haven’t completely solved the issue,” says Van der Ham. “But we were able to identify our bodies as being a key element in identifying left from right, and that we consult our body representation as we have it in a more static way.”

In Van der Ham’s experiments, the boost in performance that came from being in line with the stick person was more pronounced in people who said they use a hand-related strategy to tell left from right in their daily lives, as well as in women generally. The researchers also found that men tended to be faster in responding than women, but the data did not back up previous research showing that men perform better overall in left-right discrimination tests. 

Exactly why people differ in their ability to tell left from right isn’t clear, though research suggests that the more asymmetrical someone’s body is (in terms of writing hand preference, for example) the easier they find it to tell left and right apart. “If one side of your brain is slightly larger than the other, you tend to have a better right-left discrimination,” says Gormely.

But it could also be something that we learn in childhood, like other aspects of spatial cognition, says Van der Ham. “If kids are in charge of finding the way around, if you just let them walk in front of you for a couple of metres and make the decisions, those are the kids that ended up being better navigators,” she says.

Research by Alice Gomez and colleagues at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France hints that left-right discrimination is something that children can pick up quickly. Gomez designed a two-week intervention programme, delivered by teachers, designed to increase five-to-seven-year-olds’ body representation and motor skills.

When they were tested on their ability to locate the correct body part on themselves or a partner – their right knee, for example – after the programme, the number of left-right discrimination errors were almost halved. “It was very easy for us to increase the abilities of children to be able to locate the [body part] on the basis of the name,” says Gomez.

One reason for this might be that the children were taught a strategy – to think about their writing hand – for when they couldn’t remember right and left. The programme’s focus on children’s own bodies is another possible explanation, especially as other research shows that an egocentric reference frame is key when we make left-right decisions.

In a typical classroom, children might label body parts on a diagram rather than their own bodies, because the latter is more time-consuming and difficult to assess for a teacher, says Gomez. “It’s very rare that they will have the time to be egocentric,” she says.

While there are plenty of everyday scenarios where knowing left from right is important, there are some situations where it’s absolutely critical. Brain surgeon Marsh was able to put right his wrong-sided trapped nerve surgery – but a surgeon removing the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong limb, for example, would have devastating consequences.

Medicine is not the only field where left-right errors can make the difference between life and death: it’s possible that a steersman turning the ship right instead of left was a contributing factor in the sinking of the Titanic.

But while some people have to put in more effort to judge left and right, everybody has the ability to get left-right decisions wrong, says Gormley. He hopes that more awareness of how easy it is to make such a mistake will lead to less stigma for those who need to double check their decision.

“As health care professionals, we spend a lot of time labeling spatial orientations: proximal, distal, superior, inferior, but really pay no attention to right or left,” he says. “But actually, of all the spatial orientations, that is the most challenging.”

 

 

Original article here

14 Jan 2023
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The Mind Gym: Five Ways to Make Exercise a Pleasure

For most of my adult life, exercise was an ordeal. Even mild workouts felt grueling and I left the gym in a fouler mood than when I’d arrived. The very idea of the runner’s high seemed like a cruel joke.

As a science writer investigating the mind-body connection, however, I was surprised to discover many psychological tricks that can turn the pain into pleasure. Putting these simple tips to the test, I now happily burn between 6,000 and 7,000 calories a week with high-intensity interval training, 5km runs and yoga. What was once a torment is now the highlight of my day.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the science behind the five strategies that I found most transformative.

1. Let music be your pacemaker

Choosing the right music for a workout can be as important as picking the right playlist for a party, with ramifications for your enjoyment and your performance.

The benefits are not only found in motivational lyrics – though there’s no doubt that upbeat tracks can infuse you with positive feelings that can help to drown out the sensations of fatigue; when you are lost in the music, you simply forget how hard you are working out.

There are also some physical benefits. Loud, high-octane music also increases our “physiological arousal”, resulting in a faster heart rate that will deliver more oxygen to our muscles. And research by Costas Karageorghis, a professor of sport and exercise physiology at Brunel University London, shows that we naturally synchronise our body’s motion to the underlying rhythm. This reduces any energy-wasting irregularities in our movements and results in more efficient use of our muscles.

If you want to make the most of the pacemaker effect, the tempo of the music must match the type of exercise you are trying to perform. If you are taking a step for every beat, around 170-180bpm (such as Roar by Katy Perry) would be right for a high-intensity run. For energetic cycling, you might want something slower, such as Dangerous by David Guetta ft Sam Martin, at 92bpm.

2. Ignore #fitspo posts

Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, you’ll come across countless “fitspiration” accounts offering pictures of perfect pecs and tight torsos – a portrait of what might be possible if you only follow the right regime. Such images might seem like a sensible source of motivation, a way of focusing your mind on what you want to achieve. But a study led by Ivanka Prichard at Flinders University, Australia suggests these accounts can lead to a less rewarding workout.

The participants first scrolled through a set of 18 images. Some saw supposedly motivational photos related to fitness, such as before-and-after shots depicting a body transformation. Others saw travel photos of attractive locations. They then took to the treadmill for a 10-minute workout. Far from encouraging the exercisers, the #fitspo images had a negative effect on their mood and increased their rating of “perceived exertion”, so that they found the activity more tiring than the people who had seen the travel snaps. This seemed to be tied to lower body satisfaction – the sight of the fitness gurus had left them feeling less attractive and more concerned about their weight and shape, which put a downer on the whole experience.

3. Reframe the pain

If you are just getting started on a new fitness regime or simply having a bad day, it’s very easy to interpret feelings of fatigue as a sign of failure. The heart thumping hard in your chest, the burning of your lungs, the aches of your limbs – your body seems to be yelling at you to stop exercising. The sensations may even trigger cycles of catastrophic thinking, in which you start to exaggerate your discomfort – “this is awful”, “I can’t take it”, “I’m never going to get fit”.

Psychological science suggests that these thoughts will only amplify your distress – which may, of course, discourage you from continuing your workouts in the future. To avoid this fate, you can practise “cognitive appraisal”. This could involve taking a deliberately dispassionate view that avoids negative interpretation; you might try to passively observe the feelings without judging them. You might even try to see discomfort as a sign of progress – that you are successfully pushing your body to the max.

Studies show that these small changes in mindset can soften the sense of physical distress and the perceived exertion of exercise. Through the mind-body connection, they could even activate a beneficial “expectation effect” – akin to the placebo effect – that alters the physiological response to the exercise. One experiment by Prof Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin found that reframing muscle aches as a positive signal can ramp up the production of the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids and opioids, natural analgesics that could mask the strain.

4. Engage your imagination

Many athletes swear by the power of visualisation. American swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, imagined each event in exquisite detail. “I can see the start, the strokes, the walls, the turns, the finish, the strategy, all of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, No Limits. “Visualising like this is like programming a race in my head, and that programming sometimes seems to make it happen just as I imagined it.”

Sports science seems to back this up: the use of mental imagery can improve the accuracy of our movements, and even our overall strength. Studies show that people who spend a few minutes each day visualising the lifting of heavy weights see bigger strength gains than those who did not practise an imaginary workout. The mental rehearsal is thought to boost the nerve signals sent from the brain to the muscles, increasing the force you can exert when you finally visit the gym. This technique can be especially useful in minimising the loss of strength while recovering from injury.

5. Use temptation-bundling

For many of us, the biggest battle is getting to the gym in the first place when there are so many other activities vying for our time and attention. It’s much harder to summon the willpower to put on your trainers when you might be curled up on the sofa with a trashy novel.

If this is an issue, you can try temptation-bundling, which involves packaging the things you don’t want to do with one of your guilty pleasures. The technique was developed by Prof Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave people iPods loaded with four addictive audiobooks to enjoy while they worked out. The simple strategy increased their gym attendance by 29% over the following seven weeks.

So dust off your trainers. With each of these strategies nudging you towards your fitness goals, you may find soon find yourself making substantial gains with very little pain.

 

 

 

Original article here

29 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

How to Coexist With Animals in Cities, From Rats to Coyotes

 

When the U.S. tried to rid its cities and rural towns of coyotes starting around the 19th century, the effort backfired. While coyote control programs — involving chemical poisons, steel traps and paid bounties — did in fact kill tens of millions of the species, the population only spread further out.

“They responded by taking over the entire continent,” says Peter Alagona, an environmental historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Coyotes can now be found in every state except Alaska, as well as in parts of Canada and Central America, and they’ve moved from the fringes of cities to urban backyards.

“You have to admire their grit and adaptability for being able to live in Arctic tundra, in tropical rainforest, in deserts and in places like, you know, the Bronx,” he says.

The resiliency of coyotes is recounted in Alagona’s 2022 book, The Accidental Ecosystem, which retraces the land use decisions that have, intentionally or not, allowed some wildlife species to proliferate across the the U.S. even after they’d been deliberately targeted to make way for cities. It’s not just coyotes and commonly sighted critters like squirrels black bears, foxes and even pumas have been spotted wandering the streets of crowded metro areas.

Bloomberg CityLab spoke with Alagona about the ways in which animals have adapted to cities and even thrived there, while urbanites struggled to coexist with them.

Can you help us set up the series of events that led to the so-called “accidental ecosystem” in American cities?

There’s this early phase in which cities get established disproportionately in areas that were really rich and productive biologically, and where prosperous indigenous communities sprouted up. Wildlife gets cleared off the landscape and replaced in many of these growing urban centers with huge numbers of domesticated animals — livestock and animals we often think of today as pets — that were kind of filling the niches that wild animals would have filled.

These domesticated animals then get cleared out by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading to this period from about 1920 to 1950 where there are fewer wild animals living in urban areas, particularly in North America, than really at any time before or since. This is a period in which some of the greatest thinkers about urban life were doing their writing, and almost everybody assumed that cities weren’t going to have animals in them.

But that gap in time is fascinating because cities, by planting trees, establishing new parks and cleaning up polluted areas — decisions that people made consciously for reasons that had to do with human health, human well-being, the urban environment, real estate values, those sorts of things — were setting the stage for wildlife to come back. The increasing leafiness meant that some creatures that depended on a tree canopy, like Eastern gray squirrels or the many birds that passed through, could return.

But it wasn’t just decisions that were made inside cities that enabled not only small critters but also large mammals and predators to return?

Inside cities, creating new parks from old industrial areas created new spaces for animals to hide out during the day, and then “commute” [further] into the city at night to access resources.

At the wildland urban interface, where you have urban areas and suburbs butting up against large natural areas, you see more of these larger animals like black bears and occasionally even pumas, certainly lots of coyotes. Those are places where animals, again, can take cover during the day, and access resources along the urban fringe in the evening. This is particularly prevalent in areas like north of Los Angeles, where these foothill communities have grown right up to the edge of the national forest.

As the local environment in Pittsburgh recovered from its post-industrial era, raptors like the bald eagle returned. Big cats have always existed on the fringe of Los Angeles, but in 2016, a puma dubbed P-22 made his way into the city. Illustrator: Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studio/Courtesy of University of California Press

Then there are conservation activities in the outlying areas. On the East Coast and the Midwest, efforts to recover populations of white tail deer — which had declined dramatically during the 19th century, down to 5% of its historic numbers — in rural areas enabled those creatures to then start to colonize areas like suburbs, as suburbs grew much more widely after World War II.

How were animals able to adapt, and even thrive, in habitats that are so different from their natural ones?

It used to be thought that most creatures were fixed in their behaviors, and behavioral change would be really slow, if at all. It’s turned out, though, that quite a few creatures have shown themselves to be more flexible than people ever thought.

You have the urban exploiters, which are at home in cities and often live in cities in great numbers. These include pigeons, rats and some squirrels. Then there are the urban adapters that are not really truly at home in cities, but they come because of the resources, and they have proven pretty adaptable. If you’re driving on the freeway, and see a great blue heron foraging in a drainage ditch, those are urban adapters.

And finally, the urban avoiders are those you almost never see in cities, and when you do, it’s usually because there’s something wrong. They’re either trying to get from one patch of natural habitat to another, or they found themselves there by accident. These are creatures like pumas and wolverines.

So we can see that there are a wide variety of adaptations and evolutionary histories are at play in allowing some creatures to tap this amazing bounty of resources in our cities, while avoiding hazards including night light, chemical pollution and certainly automobiles.

Black bears and raccoons have become great at dumpster diving, and certain animals know when is the best time to come out to avoid humans. Are there concerns about how easily some animals have adapted?

There are an expanding number of these examples of rapid human-induced evolution. There are a handful of entirely new species or subspecies, particularly of insects, that have developed in particular kinds of urban environments. And then there are a wide variety of behavioral adaptations, or even physical adaptations, that seem to have occurred as a result of certain kinds of animals being put under extreme, selective pressures by the changing environments that people create.

But these examples are exceptions, not the rule. And this is very time-dependent: Although there are a small number of creatures that can adapt very quickly, for most others, this would take a long period of time — much longer than it takes for their populations to go extinct. And so the problem is [talking] about this as a solution to the fact that we’re rearranging and degrading ecosystems in ways that make the world a much harder place to live for the vast majority of species out there.

Humans, meanwhile, have struggled to adapt to the presence of wildlife. Your book describes many attempts to control animal populations, whether it’s to get rid of them or protect them, that haven’t always had the intended effect — like with coyotes. Why is that?

A big part is that emotions shape our interactions with animals. The first time a new animal shows up in an urban environment, people often react with surprise and sometimes fear. But emotions aren’t really indicative of what they are actually doing. When we see a black bear on the outskirts of a city, for example, we tend to think it’s lost or stranded [instead of] maybe taking advantage of the habitat.

These animals, though, aren’t just responding to us directly but to things we’re doing to the environment. The removal of apex predators like wolves and pumas has enabled creatures like coyotes to become the top dogs of the American landscape in many regions, even as we tried to control them. We got rid of 10 wolves, and in return in some areas, we got a hundred coyotes.

Over time, assuming that there aren’t too many kinds of negative incidents, people get used to them. In cities like Chicago, where there are large numbers of coyotes and low numbers of conflict incidents, people have really embraced these animals and come to see them as normal or even natural parts of their environment.

What is a better way to understand wildlife in our cities as we continue to coexist?

Whether we’re talking about rats or black bears, which many people perceive as being really, really different, what are the qualities that they have? Most of them are omnivores and habitat generalists, meaning even in their historic natural environments, they inhabit a lot of different kinds of ecosystems. Many of them care for their young. Many of them are curious; they learn lessons and pass on their knowledge to other members of their group. If you add all these things up together, what does that sound like?

Humans?

Exactly! People don’t want to hear that there are so many rats in cities because rats are kind of like us, and have some of the same fundamental biological qualities that make humans so successful.

And so it’s good to remember that we’re all inhabiting the same environments in many cases because there are at least a few things that we have in common.

What does that mean, then, for how cities should approach wildlife management going forward?

This goes back to the legacy of that key period in the early 20th century, when people were thinking about what modern cities should be. In cities, we tend to think of wildlife, if at all, in terms of pest control.

But what if we thought about wildlife in terms of conservation? What kinds of habitats do we want to create, and what kinds of creatures do we want to surround ourselves with? To do that, we need to think about reorienting pest control toward habitat management and not so much just like lethal control. We need to think about the fact that our agencies don’t really have good mechanisms for including wildlife in their decision-making processes.

And on an individual basis, people are doing kind of crowdsourced wildlife management all the time, and they just don’t know it. If you’re planting trees around your home, you are repelling some creatures and inviting others. If you’re going twice the speed limit, you’re increasing the risk that some species are going to die on the roads. If we account for these creatures more often, it would probably create a better, healthier environment for them and for us.

 

 

 

Original article here

26 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

In Praise of Doing Nothing

 

In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.

Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.

It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.”

It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness.

Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times.”

In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable.

But it’s never been more important.

Acceleration for the Sake of Acceleration

In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?

Why aren’t things easier?

It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration.

According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions.

We see this on factory floors, where “just-in-time” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.

Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration.

To Rosa, this acceleration eerily mimics the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight.

The Oppression of Speed

Unchecked acceleration has consequences.

At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed.

At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.

 

 

For example, research finds two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.

When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – a number that’s only expected to grow. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.

American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.

Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.

It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.

Doing Nothing and ‘Being’

In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.

But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.

Much research – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.

Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with non-productivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological research suggests that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies.

As legends go, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well known for staring for hours into space in his office.

The academic sabbatical is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas.

Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something.

The key is to balance the two.

Taking Your Foot Off the Pedal 

Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.

Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. In another experiment, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.

Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming.

As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects.

Touted by the mass media and corporate culture, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “the good life” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.

French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

 

 

Original article here

22 Dec 2022
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Not just light: Everything is a wave, including you

In 1905, the 26-year-old Albert Einstein proposed something quite outrageous: that light could be both wave or particle. This idea is just as weird as it sounds. How could something be two things that are so different? A particle is small and confined to a tiny space, while a wave is something that spreads out. Particles hit one another and scatter about. Waves refract and diffract. They add on or cancel each other out in superpositions. These are very different behaviors.

Hidden in translation

The problem with this wave-particle duality is that language has issues accommodating both behaviors coming from the same object. After all, language is built of our experiences and emotions, of the things we see and feel. We do not directly see or feel photons. We probe into their nature with experimental set-ups, collecting information through monitors, counters, and the like.

The photons’ dual behavior emerges as a response to how we set up our experiment. If we have light passing through narrow slits, it will diffract like a wave. If it collides with electrons, it will scatter like a particle. So, in a way, it is our experiment, the question we are asking, that determines the physical nature of light. This introduces a new element into physics: the observer’s interaction with the observed. In more extreme interpretations, we could almost say that the intention of the experimenter determines the physical nature of what is being observed — that the mind determines physical reality. That’s really out there, but what we can say for sure is that light responds to the question we are asking in different ways. In a sense, light is both wave and particle, and it is neither.

This brings us to Bohr’s model of the atom, which we discussed a couple of weeks back. His model pins electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus to specific orbits. The electron can only be in one of these orbits, as if it is set on a train track. It can jump between orbits, but it cannot be in between them. How does that work, exactly? To Bohr, it was an open question. The answer came from a remarkable feat of physical intuition, and it sparked a revolution in our understanding of the world.

The wave nature of a baseball

In 1924, Louis de Broglie, a historian turned physicist, showed quite spectacularly that the electron’s step-like orbits in Bohr’s atomic model are easily understood if the electron is pictured as consisting of standing waves surrounding the nucleus. These are waves much like the ones we see when we shake a rope that is attached at the other end. In the case of the rope, the standing wave pattern appears due to the constructive and destructive interference between waves going and coming back along the rope. For the electron, the standing waves appear for the same reason, but now the electron wave closes on itself like an ouroboros, the mythic serpent that swallows its own tail. When we shake our rope more vigorously, the pattern of standing waves displays more peaks. An electron at higher orbits corresponds to a standing wave with more peaks.

With Einstein’s enthusiastic support, de Broglie boldly extended the notion of wave-particle duality from light to electrons and, by extension, to every moving material object. Not only light, but matter of any kind was associated with waves.

De Broglie offered a formula known as de Broglie wavelength to compute the wavelength of any matter with mass m moving at velocity v. He associated wavelength λ to m and v — and thus to momentum p = mv — according to the relation λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant. The formula can be refined for objects moving close to the speed of light.

As an example, a baseball moving at 70 km per hour has an associated de Broglie wavelength of about 22 billionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter (or 2.2 x 10-32 cm). Clearly, not much is waving there, and we are justified in picturing the baseball as a solid object. In contrast, an electron moving at one-tenth the speed of light has a wavelength about half the size of a hydrogen atom (more precisely, half the size of the most probable distance between an atomic nucleus and an electron at its lowest energy state).

While the wave nature of a moving baseball is irrelevant to understanding its behavior, the wave nature of the electron is essential to understand its behavior in atoms. The crucial point, though, is that everything waves. An electron, a baseball, and you.

Quantum biology

De Broglie’s remarkable idea has been confirmed in countless experiments. In college physics classes we demonstrate how electrons passing through a crystal diffract like waves, with superpositions creating dark and bright spots due to destructive and constructive interference. Anton Zeilinger, who shared the physics Nobel prize this year, has championed diffracting ever-larger objects, from the soccer-ball-shaped C60 molecule (with 60 carbon atoms) to biological macromolecules.

The question is how life under such a diffraction experiment would behave at the quantum level. Quantum biology is a new frontier, one where the wave-particle duality plays a key role in the behavior of living beings. Can life survive quantum superposition? Can quantum physics tell us something about the nature of life?

 

 

 

Original article here