Category Archives: science

Misanthropic principle

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di090310

Even Japanese teenagers are somewhat familiar with the anthropic principle, it seems.

You may be familiar with the “anthropic principle”, the notion that the universe seems to be suspiciously ideal for human life. If only one of the many cosmological constant had been a tiny bit different, intelligent life – or even life at all – would not have been possible. There are just so many things that must go right for us to be here.

While this was not its original purpose, the anthropic principle has been cited as a reason for theism, the belief in one or more higher beings that created and/or guided the universe to this state of being.

In contrast, atheists generally cite the reverse anthropic principle: If the universe were not fit for intelligent life, we would not be here to talk about it. There could be trillions of uninhabited universes and we would never know, since we could not live in them. (In fact, many cosmologists take for granted that there are a huge number of universes just for this reason, that it would be extremely unlikely that the only universe ever was one that harbored life. Others say that this multiplies entities beyond necessity, thus falling foul of Occam’s Razor.)

The original misanthropic principle, I believe, is that “danger and death is necessary for intelligence to evolve; therefore a universe with observers is necessarily a scary one.” However, I use the phrase in a more playful way, to illustrate the attitude in this little verbal sketch:

Alice: Bob, I experienced a genuine miracle!
Bob: There are no miracles, just more and less likely events.
Alice: Wait till you hear this. I was on a passenger flight yesterday, and suddenly our plane exploded more than a mile up in the air! I was thrown out as the plane broke in two, and plummeted toward my death. Then suddenly I crashed into an eagle, and it broke my fall a bit, but of course not enough. Just afterward, however, I hit another eagle, and another, and another. This continued all the way down until I landed safely on a bed of moss. It cannot be anything other than a miracle!
Bob: Let me just ask you one thing. If you were dead, would you still be telling me this?
Alice: Of course not!
Bob: See? Since you are here, it was not only likely, it was downright unavoidable! There is nothing mysterious about it at all.

Why diets don’t work

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di090307

Sometimes food just happens. This is a lot less cute when you are 50.

The twin scourges obesity and inactivity are raging through the world, maiming and killing like a berserker army. Each of them encourages the other: Feel free to try jogging with a hundred pound backpack, but be sure to have your last will and testament done first. Likewise, sitting still helps the fat just pile on, forcing you to be even less active, and so on and on.

Given the grim statistics for diabetes, atherosclerosis, hypertension and the secondary diseases that follow in their footsteps, you’d think the world’s governments would be waging a War on Fat. And you would definitely think it would be one of the hottest topics of science. The world is already spending billions on diets, so why can’t scientists come right out and tell us which one is the best?

Well, you see, none of them work. Or rather, pretty much all of them work, but not in the long run. Losing weight is fairly easy, but large studies show that the pounds come back on. The scientific consensus is that significant weight loss is pretty near impossible (except in the case of chronic illness, of course). It is possible to lose a little weight – like 5% or so – and keep it off. If you get serious about losing weight, however, the body eventually gets serious too. And at some point, it stops listening to you. Basically, your free will starts fading.

This is a disturbing situation, and well worth considering. We all know from experience that we have free will. We can decide to do something unpleasant and do it, and we can decide to not do something pleasant and avoid it. In each case, we clearly see ourselves as having a choice. But the law of large numbers says something else. In the long run, it is easier to ride the horse the way it is already going. In the case of the weight loss, the body will throw at us ever more frequent and intense temptations. If that is not enough, the discomfort will intrude on our lives more and more: Hunger pangs that make it impossible to sleep, chronic fatigue that makes it hard to be active and burn calories. In extreme cases, you may find that there are blank spots in your memory and empty spots in the fridge. You have no memory of having eaten, and you certainly don’t feel like you have eaten, but you have. You may even find that food is gone from your fridge while you slept. The body will defend its fat as if it were its life. And that is no coincidence.

In the wild, too much food is not the problem. For tens of thousands of years, until just recently, hunger was the real risk. A surplus of food was temporary. If you started losing weight, no matter what your weight was at the outset, the body would interpret this as a famine coming on. It still does. And it will do what it takes to defend you from starvation, even if it means tricking or outright overruling your free will.

One clue comes from people with anorexia. It has been known for a while that patients with this mental illness have a very high mortality. But a look at the causes of death shows something less obvious: A striking number of the deaths are from suicide.

Other studies show that a lot of people – especially women – sometimes want to kill themselves but cannot. Humans are basically built with a certain level of protection. When facing death, we shrink back automatically. This is a good thing, and it is in a way unfortunate that it does not always work. As I like to say, the game is rigged: You can kill yourself when you are feeling down, but you cannot become immortal when you are feeling good. But at least it turns out there is some level of defense. But some people don’t have that level of defense. And these are the same people who are able to lose weight indefinitely. In other words, as far as the brain knows, weight loss is just another type of suicide, and it will use the whole range of defenses to avoid it.

The irony of this is of course that in our time, gaining weight above the “well rounded” level is the actual suicide. The body thinks otherwise, however.

What does help, then? First of all, it is best to not have put the weight on in the first place. But the single most reliable predictor of body fat is the body fat of people around you: Friends, family and coworkers. This works even on a national level: A Japanese moving to America will gain weight over the course of just months, while an American moving to Japan will eventually lose some. But it also works on a local level. The people around you seem to somehow calibrate you to eat slightly more or less than you normally would. (I had noticed this effect on myself long before I read about it in popular science magazines, but then again I don’t always know that I am typical enough to be a useful example.)

And physical activity seems to be more important than body mass anyway. As I said, the problem is that being obese makes it hard to exercise. But you have to start at the level where you are. Remember, if you are severely obese, you are literally in the same situation as someone who carries a heavy load, so don’t try exercise that would be suitable for a slim person. That would be like them going jogging with a heavy recliner strapped to their back or something. Simply walking will be great exercise for the obese, and in the beginning you may want to limit yourself to stretches where you can find a place to sit down and rest if you get exhausted. The single biggest jump is from complete inactivity to a little exercise. Once you get used to that, your body will gradually adapt, so you can be a tiny bit more active next week again, and so on.

But trying to simply assert your willpower and stop eating (or eat just tomatoes)? Won’t work. The body comes with failsafe against that kind of crazy behavior. It keeps tabs on you and if your diet works, it will start blocking it.

Perhaps science will have a solution one day. For now, all it has is an explanation, but we can use that to adapt at least to some extent.

HoloSync pseudoscience

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di090305

I may have too much time on my hands, but it could also be that I don’t understand because it makes no sense.

I think Bill Harris and the Centerpointe Research Institute are doing a commendable job in some ways, making binaural beat technology attractive to the non-scientist public. (The same goes for the original Monroe Institute, with their Hemi-Sync, but let us take one sync at a time here.) What I don’t think is commendable is the faux science. In all fairness, it is not all just taken out of thin air, but some of it is exaggerated, speculative or interpreted in a less than likely way.

For instance, a central claim for HoloSync is that the unusual stimulus is “overloading” the brain, forcing it to “reorganize on a higher level” by growing new neurons connecting the two hemispheres. This is classical pseudoscience. It is almost certainly true that you grow new neurons while listening to HoloSync, but you grow new neurons while listening to Beethoven or a crying baby, or watching porn, or feeding your dog. Almost all neuron growth in adults (and then some) takes place in the hippocampus (the “file allocation table” of the brain, the index that lets us recall memories). Any conscious experience is stored in the brain and connected through the hippocampus. Few other places see actual new neurons, but don’t worry: Existing neurons can grow and establish new connections, even thousands of them in extreme cases. Existing connections can become faster and more reliable.

Since the binaural beat is in fact created by cooperation between the two hemispheres, it seems likely to increase adaptation in the brain to synchronize the two sides more easily. People who have used this for a while will almost certainly find it easier to establish a standing brain wave in both hemispheres at once. But this is no more a “reorganization on a higher level” than people who read kanji will find it easier to read kanji. That is how brains work. Whatever you do, your brain will endeavor to make you do it better.

So it is not that binaural beats don’t work. They certainly do, and there is pretty solid research on that. They just work differently, do something else than what Centerpointe claims. Or at least something else than what you would believe Centerpointe claims, if you read their materials as a non-scientist.

Again, HoloSync (and competitors) train you in creating, maintaining and recognizing standing waves across both hemispheres of the brain, waves of a lower frequency than usually experienced while we are conscious. This may come in handy during meditation, where you set aside the distractions of ordinary thought so as to focus your mind on the eternal and immaterial. (“All that has form is subject to decay; Strive diligently” to quote the Buddha’s last words.) And regardless of any spiritual practice, defragmenting the mind is bound to be a good thing for most people in our stressed time. (Although breaking the boundaries of the ordinary life may be bad for a minority – if you have a history or family history of psychosis, you should talk with a professional before starting to hack your brain waves. Centerpointe fails to mention this as well, or at least I never noticed.)

Obviously some simplification is acceptable. We have the expression “lies to children” to describe that. For instance, we portray the electrons like balls orbiting around the atomic nucleus, but that’s not what they really are. They are more like fields, not easily defined in space. (Uncertainty principle and all that.) I probably did not take any harm from being deceived about the nature of atoms when I was a kid – I simply could not have understood the real thing. Actually I still don’t, I just understand it a bit better, mostly understanding more of how little I understand.

But I think HoloSync (and HemiSync) are not so much simplifying it, for the real thing is fairly simple, only a bit different. By training our brain to maintain standing waves, we raise our consciousness of how our brain works in a hands-on way. Surely that is just as impressive. And we become better at fending off distractions, since we can regulate our brains in more ways. That’s something to write home about, don’t you think?

Another speculation – as far as I can see at least – is the notion that the brain is producing Human Growth Hormone and other “beneficial neurochemicals” during delta waves. The brain does indeed do this during deep, dreamless sleep, where synchronized delta waves are the dominant pattern. But this does not mean that the delta waves cause all the effects of deep sleep. It could easily be that the waves are another effect rather than a cause. You have to specifically measure increased levels of growth hormone during artificially induced delta waves in conscious subjects, and I have seen nothing of that so far. Then again the research section of the website is somewhat chaotic and reads like a cross between a scientific report and a sales pitch, which is probably intentional.

The one invention that sets HoloSync apart from the other Syncs is the discovery that you can increase the effect of binaural beats by lowering the frequency of the carrying waves. As I’ve mentioned, you get binaural beats by giving two slightly different frequencies to each ear. For instance if one signal has an average frequency of 500 Hz and the other has the same modulations but average on 508 Hz, you get a standing wave of 8 Hz in the brain. That’s the secret of binaural beat technology. But according to Harris, the same resulting wave is more “powerful” if the carrying frequency is lower. To the best of my reading so far, nobody else has ever noticed this, and the thousands of happy customers of the competing Syncs seem not to miss it at all.

I won’t say out of hand that Harris just made this up in order to fleece the disciples, by selling them new “higher steps” every half year or so. The effect may well be observable, but it does not seem to have neither neurological nor spiritual origin. More likely it stems from the all too human tendency to want to measure our progress, to “level up” as we gamers say.

But I’ll hopefully find out more about this after I have joined the ranks of happy HoloSync customers. As with other my recent purchases (the Linux netbook and the Neural Impulse Actuator), I try to support those technologies I wish to see in the future, even if they are far from perfect yet – as long as they are marginally useful. And from my few days of experiments with HoloSync, it seems to fall in that category, warts and all.

Do other people change?

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di090304 I am sure a sore throat can improve after three days, and perhaps some simple skills, but what about personality? How many days, years or decades does that take?  Is it even possible?

I was home sick Monday. It is merely a severe cold, I think. Not enough fever to be the flu, though I have been uncomfortable the whole weekend and coughed up green goo. It was therefore well deserved to get a day off from work. To further console me, I got a thick envelope in the mailbox. It was the demo CD and promotional brochures from Centerpointe, creators of HoloSync.

I wrote about HoloSync last month, and my opinion has not changed much. It has not changed much even after listening to their demo CD. It contains soft soothing background sounds that also carry a binaural beat, a difference in frequency between the left and right ear. (Earphones strongly recommended – in fact, they claim it won’t work without them, while the Monroe Institute believe that you may also use one loudspeaker on each side of you and still get some effect.) The binaural beat will gradually – over a period of minutes – create a standing wave in your brain. In this demo, the wave slowly deepens over the course of the demo, taking your brain into frequencies usually only seen during sleep or very deep meditation. In fact, most people would fall asleep if not for the voice.

The voice belongs to Bill Harris, founder and leader of Centerpointe Research Institute. While the scientifically proven sound effects gradually slow down your critical mind to a crawl, he will tell you what an amazing thing HoloSync is. This is so blatant, I cannot even call it swindling. He is all up front about the effects, unless you have been reading the website very superficially and start the CD without having read the thick scientific-looking paper enclosed. And who would do that? Just locate the CD, pop it in and close their eyes? Even then he tells you at the outset that you would probably fall asleep if he wasn’t talking. (In the end, I fell asleep anyway, but then again my clogged bronchial tubes have made it hard to get enough sleep this weekend. I would almost certainly have fallen asleep anyway if I closed my eyes for 20 minutes, even if the King of Norway himself had been speaking.)

I woke up when the sound stopped, feeling calm and clear-headed and with a deep need to buy HoloSync… OK, just kidding about the last part. I am mildly surprised that it did not seem to influence my feeling on the matter, but then again I was fairly positive already. And just in case I was still undecided, the sound came back on. The next quarter of an hour or so was filled with testimonials from satisfied users, some of them with European accents not unlike my own. (Being international is a big bonus point for them in my book. I hate having to pretend to be American to check out some new technology.)

Now we are homing in on today’s headline. You see, these people had experienced so many wonderful changes in their lives. And some of them even claimed that their family and coworkers had noticed. Now that made my ears perk up. (And I can literally move my ears, by the way, to an amazing degree for a human. Why didn’t I procreate when I still could? What a loss to the human gene pool!)

Change. You see, a lot of people believe in change. While most prefer to try to change the world instead of themselves, there are still a goodly number of people who earnestly set out to change their lives to the better. Midlife crises often have this effect, I think. I have previously described my journal as “like a midlife crisis without the crisis”, and this is a big part of it. I have seen so much new over these last few years, I wish I could share it with others. But the more I see, the more removed I become from ordinary human experience, and the harder it becomes to share it. So you get entries like this instead.

Saying “I have changed for the better” is one thing. Mildly interesting, even that. But what really makes me sit up with a start is when someone says “My husband has changed for the better” or “My brother has become a better person.” You see, we tend to very easily place good things on ourselves, things like improvement. If we feel more goodwill to other people, we are happy. But until THEY feel our goodwill, I am still only moderately impressed.

Unfortunately none of the testimonials were from people telling me that their family members had become better people thanks to HoloSync. Rather, this were the people who supposedly had become better people, telling me that their family also thought so. This is a step in the right direction, but not a very big step.

You see, I have known people who changed for the better. In the Christian Church, this was not exactly unfamiliar. It was more or less expected. Some of the changes were pretty drastic, such as alcoholics or drug abusers who completely left their old life behind and became radically self-sacrificing people. And they did not need to meditate for 10-15 years to experience this change either. Then again, their new life needed a lot of “after care”, so it wasn’t exactly a hobby for them.

You could ask their family and friends and they would tell you in no uncertain terms that these people had changed. They had not just improved, they had become new, they had been transformed. But there were never all that many, to be honest. Most of my friends in the Christian Church had always been fairly nice, so it was more of an in-depth work that others could not see. I am not out to belittle that. And anyway the Christian Church at the time was quite small and not growing fast at all. There was rejoicing for every soul who was added to the Church, and for everyone who stayed despite the relentless pull of the World.

It may seem unfair to compare a living Church to a $127 techno-meditation course. Scratch that, it is blatantly unfair. I wouldn’t do it if they weren’t this close to doing it themselves, with the fervent testimonials and comparison to “saints and mystics of the last 10 000 years”. I’ve known a very few of those, you see. And it is hard to not be a little bit changed just by that. But that is another story, not for today.

Be that as it may, I started thinking. I have mentioned that the western world is flooded by self-help books and videos and retreats, so that you would expect to walk among demigods and heroes. But the opposite seems more true. One must be grateful that some of one’s coworkers actually wash their hands after a heavy-duty session on the toilet. (A prior medical condition has given me the opportunity to spend more time in the lavatory than average, so I am starting to notice trends. I can’t see who they are though, and they can’t see me. Though they can probably hear me scrubbing my hands for as long as it takes to sing two verses of “Happy Birthday To You”, although I don’t actually sing that out loud.)

So dear reader: Have you known someone whose life was changed, radically improved, transformed or at least much better in any way through any physical or spiritual practice? Let us exclude life phases, like college and marriage and parenthood. Antidepressants are probably not quite newsworthy either. But anything from the Atkins Diet to the Torah, as long as there are noticeable and long-lasting changes in people’s lives. People who are not you. Tell me, tell me. I am all (movable) ears.

Goodbye Tamiflu

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di0903031

What is the meaning of this apple?  It is to keep the doctor away so he doesn’t give you useless flu medicine.

As I mentioned in January 2004, I remember scientific magazines trumpeting neuraminidase inhibitors as the end of influenza, more or less. And with the rise of the Bird Flu threat, governments in the rich world bought huge quantities of Tamiflu, the edible product. (Relenza is inhaled, which causes greater risk for side effects. In particular, it is not well suited for asthma patients, which are among those who need flu medicine the most.)

Last year, about 19% of flu cases in the USA were immune to Tamiflu. This season the number is close to 100%, and it is worldwide. Tamiflu simply has no effect anymore against ordinary flu. It may still protect us against the bird flu, which is a different strain. But we don’t know that, because the avian flu has not yet mutated to a form that spreads easily among humans. If it does, it will almost certainly be by combining genes with ordinary human flu. Which means it may or may not pick up the immunity to Tamiflu. There is no way to know until it comes, if it comes.

Here is one article, one of many. “Hundreds of thousands of flu patients continue to be treated with Tamiflu this season,” Roche replies in this Reuters article. Which is true enough. The sad part is for 98.5 % of them, a spoon of honey would have been just as effective and tasted a lot better. Sucks to be Roche, since this is a flagship product for them, and they have probably built large factories to supply the surge of demand from rich world governments stockpiling for the avian flu.

Influenza is already resistant to two older attempts at medication, but neuraminidase inhibitors were supposed to be the final solution. Work is still in progress for the next attempt to curb this implacable enemy of mankind. A generic antibody shows some promise, but is still years from reaching the market even if it works and is found to be safe. (Source: International Herald Tribune)

Vaccine is still the best way to prevent the flu, but at least here in Norway there is not nearly enough to create herd immunity. Only the elderly, the chronically sick, health workers and a few other crucial public servants are encouraged to get the vaccine. (It varies a bit from year to year – some years there is more and people are encouraged to come and buy the rest.)

So for the near future, we shall once again have to rely on washing hands and getting plenty of sleep. Not a bad idea anyway, I say. (At least until our meditation practice replaces sleep – more about that in 10-15 years perhaps…)