Crosswords don’t make you clever(economist.com) |
Crosswords don’t make you clever(economist.com) |
This is a pretty good article about natural vs supplemental Vitamin D intake: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/vitamin-d-sun-exposure-supple...
The original article linked to a scientific study in which nocturnal animals (rats) were exposed to light over long time periods, which caused the rats to get stressed and depressed.
Apparently, the article's author concluded from this that diurnal animals like humans must get stressed and depressed by long periods of darkness. Probably true, but certainly not supported by the cited study. And it had nothing to do specifically with sunlight, per se.
With regard to the "natural vs supplement" argument, some people are very pale and susceptible to skin cancer. It may not be safe for everyone to get enough Vitamin D through natural means alone.
What cause most Vitamin D issues today is that people are NOT enough in the sun...
I personally dislike the sun and used to avoid it a lot (because I am more or less white and it burns me fast), now I have a really bad Vitamin D deficiency and was obliged by the medics to take supplements.
I stopped avoiding the sun... But it is still not really enough (I am programmer... I wake up in a dark room, walk to work in the sun, but the walk is 5 minutes, and then I stay indoors until night, when I walk back home, without any sun, thus my total sun daily is 5 minutes :/)
I fully admit that teasing out correlation and causality is very difficult in situations like this.
-------
While the presence "neuroscience" should be enough to set off your bullshit detector, the fact the the author couldn't go two paragraphs without undermining his own point indicates that the title should really be "Nothing to see here". Luckily the author throws in a gratuitous and creepy reference to female orgasms to make sure readers won't feel ripped off having wasted 15 seconds reading this crap.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/brainwashed-neuroscience...
goes into some additional detail about what we can know, and can't know, from current neuroscience research. The best of current neuroscience research helps us know what is flat wrong about earlier preliminary findings from neuroscience research, while the worst of current neuroscience research feeds on the hype hooks in the science news cycle
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
to tell us things we want to believe even if they aren't true. As always, we have to discern what's established fact and what's speculation in reports about new research findings.
EDIT: I wrote the above when the title was "Gym workouts and sunbathing do more for your brain than crosswords and Mozart" and the link was to a different URL.
Cognitive training outperforms crossword puzzles: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Crossword puzzles aren't protective against cognitive decline: http://portalsaudebrasil.com/artigospsb/idoso068.pdf [PDF link]
I don't think they make me clever either, but they do calm me down and help me settle into whatever area I'm in. That helps me take the edge off of what I'm about to say/present. It's not quite the same as staring at a flashlight (a la tablet/laptop).
The paper and pencil in my hands have a dramatic effect on my mood. Add a cup of coffee on the side and I'm a completely different person after a crossword. I'd say a noticeably more lucid (even without the added coffee), calm and collected individual.
Personally I've lived 61 degrees north for most of my life and I don't think SAD has been a problem for me.
- I've suspected and read from others that all the fuzz about classical music is mostly the result of some kind of high culture bias - I have a hard time believing that people have studied the effects of classical music to the same extent as something like rock or techno. I wouldn't be surprised if studies show that listening to your favourite music has overall more benefits compared to listening to classical music whether you like it or not.
"...the brain of nocturnal rats generates a stress response to a long-day photoperiod, contributing to depression..."
Somebody must have extrapolated from this result that, since humans are diurnal, long periods of darkness would cause us stress and depression.
There is no direct mention of Vitamin K (or for that matter, any healthful benefits of the sun) in the cited study.
"elite athletes...perform better than the rest of us in yet another way. These athletes excel...in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information -- cognitive abilities that are important on and off the court." [1]
[1]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130318151634.ht...
I've seen much less as research professors or computer programmers. This could also be because the time commitments required in school for these topics is inconsistent with what's required to do sports competitively.
I'm not saying that exercise is bad. I'm positive that it's good. It's just my perception that those who exercise more in their youth tended not to be the best students.
If the article actually compared the benefits of fitness to the benefits of playing music - now that could speak to your question.
What about playing an instrument? Don’t you have to use right and left brain for a stringed instrument?
Yes. That has clear cognitive functions that do crossover. Especially learning to play and read the music at the same time. But exercise is number one, diet number two and then social interaction. These are the important things for brain function.edit: maybe being good at both is a sign of an innate skill for abstraction, or maybe it's another way for a student to dive into a subject and grow new abstractions and reinforce his brain.
Now I think there may be some causality. Learning music is an intro to binary math. (2 half notes in a whole note. Two quarter notes in a half note.)
I haven't seen a good empirical study to try and split this apart.
In that regard, it would also be similar to the exercise comparison in that any single exercise is likely to have very limited impact, but a rounded exercise routine provides much stronger benefits.
Fallacy right there.
As for "listening to Mozart," that strikes me as an extremely passive (i.e., cognitively untaxing) activity. I've always been highly skeptical of the putative benefits of listening to music, because the brain is extremely good at "tuning out" ambient sounds. I'd be more inclined to believe there's some benefit if the listener actively attempts to listen and perform another task simultaneously. Trying to keep attention focused on two very complex tasks at once is challenging; simply kicking back and letting music stream in the background is not. I'm sure there are creative benefits to listening to complex and stimulating music, but one needs to be actively engaged in the music.
My lay theorizing on this: certain types of music (and much of the classical repetoire) helps relax the mind. We spend far too much of our time being grossly overstimulated, and I've found that a great many of the typical stimulations in a Western experience (advertising, technology, popular music, city streets, etc.) simply wear at me. Nature, nonlinear landscapes, classical (or earlier) Western music (there is some awfully annoying non-western music, Indonesian gamelan being very high on the annoyance list for me) help immensely in this regard.
Just as strength training is stimulus for growth that comes during recovery, I suspect music may be part of the downtime which helps the brain and/or emotional / stress aspects of the body recover. Meditation or similar practices might operate similarly.
Total armchair theory here, but it's what I've got.
Music is invisible at first, the journey between unconscious appreciation and the 'parsing' stage is long, and full of counter intuitive realizations, which to me, is the same whatever domain your try to understand.
Another parallel is the way we interface with these. There's the remote long round trip way and the direct tangible way. For computers : large systems requiring pauses in your knowledge acquisition, think ~minutes build times (this is the main view on computers, lisp OSes and smalltalk browsers are unknown to many) vs REPLs. In music there's music theory[1], lots of wasteful (borderline absurd) ceremony and delay before reaching to the music itself, and just following along, failing and trying again (here I think the most used one is the direct, you buy an instrument and "play" without real understanding, opposite of computers).
Hoping I wasn't too blurry.
[1] Have you seen Chris Ford Functional Composition talk ? https://www.google.com/search?q=chris+ford+functional+compos... (youtube/skillsmater hosted) He manage to layer music theory ideas in a very simple manner in one hour, with direct rendering of what they are. Much more efficient than what I could experience or see in music classes younger (I understand that kid psychology is different especially in groups). It's really not very profound and actually it won't teach you music, just reference ideas needed to then impregnate the whole subject through your won learning process (I believe it's a 10000hour thing).
Passive/ambient listening may have some benefit to a small baby, whose brain is much more plastic and is generally responsive to interesting stimuli. But for adults, a more active and taxing activity is probably in order. I agree with you that the loci of improvement are probably concentration and recall.
Excess dietary calcium is stored in the bone bank and withdrawn when one of the 100+ crucial human biochemical reactions requiring calcium lowers the blood availability.
Perhaps there are ways of maximizing the effect of one of our most important and most used nutrients, but nothing can replace the Ca element and it's widespread, fundamental usage in our body.
I wish I could watch your video (I don't speak German) but I want to stress that Ca is absolutely a requirement for healthy bones, and is the #1 requirement. Without calcium intake, there cannot be bone for long.
"For example, some of the proteins produced in response to calcitriol in the intestine help transport calcium across the intestine and into the bloodstream, greatly increasing the absorption of calcium from the diet. The vitamin D receptor is found in several cells that are critical for controlling the metabolism of calcium, phosphorus, and bone: intestinal cells, bone cells, kidney cells, and parathyroid gland cells."
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-is-vitamin-d-and-...
"Vitamin D’s best-known role is to keep bones healthy by increasing the intestinal absorption of calcium. Without enough vitamin D, the body can only absorb 10% to 15% of dietary calcium, but 30% to 40% absorption is the rule when vitamin reserves are normal." ... "Low levels of vitamin D lead to low bone calcium stores, increasing the risk of fractures." ... "In the intestines, the receptors capture vitamin D, enabling efficient calcium absorption. But similar receptors are also present in many other organs, from the prostate to the heart, blood vessels, muscles, and endocrine glands."
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/vitamin-d-and-your-he...
Video Translation 01:55 min.: Dr. Feil: "The basil, we use today much much [sic] more herbs, because we see, that herbs stabilize the bones. In the past, it was always said, 'bones and calcium', today we say, the sportsperson needs herbs, to have a strong bone structure". And at 04:31 Dr. Feil: "We recommed today, to eat two handful of nuts every day, that makes the bones strong. ..." [a few seconds later, he recommends walnuts, slightly roasted as the best option]
edit: at 15:21 Dr. Feil: "The Red wine has ... much more boric, the micronutrient boric is good for the bones, ...", he recommends to drink 5 glasses per week (not a whole bottle)
A very pale person may burn in 5 minutes. It doesn't make sense that your body would speed up the synthesis of cholesterol just because your skin has less melanin or is more sensitive to UV radiation. Also keep in mind that no matter how much is synthesized it's up to the liver and kidney to make it into a useful hormone.
http://essays.backintyme.com/item/4
> The lightness adaptation enhances calciferol (vitamin D) synthesis. Too much epidermal melanin for the latitude blocks UV penetration essential to the dermal synthesis of calciferol or vitamin D.
If you have less melanin then more sunlight reaches the lower layers of skin which increases vit D synthesis.
There's also the perception when you're younger (or at least distinctly for me and the people I grew up with), that being smart was 'boring' and being sporty was better, so they wouldn't apply themselves in lessons because it wasn't cool. I imagine a lot of them were plenty smart, but they might not have let on.
Let's say the first hour is 100% productive, the 2nd is 60%. Perhaps the third is 30% and the 4th 20%? But would they really undo the good of hours one and two?
The research quoted in a lot of the Deliberate Practice literature suggests we can only focus intensely for 4 hours a day. Then it's a question of wasted time, or harmful time.
So, I do think there is a limit for consciously doing hard math. Subconsciously, however, who knows what one's brain is doing? There's plenty of anecdotes about working hard on a problem for hours without apparent progress and then, suddenly, having the breakthrough insight during a walk or in bed, supposedly during a break of working on the problem. Famous anecdotes are Archimedes in bath and Kekule's dream about snakes and benzene.
Now, chances are these guys were still thinking of the problem (one advantage of theoretical work is that you can combine it with most low-effort activities) and nobody who gets such an epiphany knows whether just keeping churning would have led to the same result, possibly earlier, but I think that there is some truth in this. Just as running for 16 hours a day is not the best training for any race, it is good to have breaks from doing extensive math.
Also, in my experience, real understanding of mathematical concepts comes to me after I've studied it, when I'm thinking about the matter in the background while doing other things. It's plausible that, if I were to overextend myself, I'd lose focus and not assimilate that much later.