Lone Gunman

Whether caf­feine serves any pur­pose other than remov­ing with­drawal symp­toms is a topic of study with con­flict­ing results, but if you’re an opti­mist as well as a fan of caf­feine in any of it’s many forms you’re most likely con­sum­ing it sub-optimally.

Why not improve your caf­feine knowl­edge and learn­ing about the opti­mal way of con­sum­ing the world’s most-used stim­u­lant; caf­feine:

• Con­sume in small, fre­quent amounts: Between 20-200mg per hour may be an opti­mal dose for cog­ni­tive function.
• Play to your cog­ni­tive strengths: Caf­feine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease atten­tional lapses, and may even ben­e­fit recall — but is less likely to ben­e­fit more com­plex cog­ni­tive func­tions, and may even hurt oth­ers. Plan accordingly.
• Play to caffeine’s strengths: Caffeine’s effects can be max­i­mized or min­i­mized depend­ing on what else is in your sys­tem at the time.
• Know when to stop — and when to start again: Although you may not grow strongly tol­er­ant to caf­feine, you can become depen­dent on it and suf­fer with­drawal symp­toms. Bal­ance these con­cerns with the cog­ni­tive and health ben­e­fits asso­ci­ated with caf­feine con­sump­tion — and appro­pri­ately timed resumption.

So that’s one cup of reg­u­lar cof­fee — with sugar and/or soy milk — every hour when per­form­ing rel­a­tively sim­ple cog­ni­tive tasks.

Back­ground noises greatly affect how we taste food. I wrote about this ear­lier in the year — point­ing out that this is the prob­a­ble cause of bland in-flight meals — but how else can back­ground noise affect our per­cep­tion of taste, and can our non-gustatory senses affect how we taste, too?

To test this, mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­o­mist Hes­ton Blu­men­thal and pro­fes­sor Charles Spence con­ducted a fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ment with some ‘bacon and egg’ ice cream and some var­ied sound­tracks. The full exper­i­ment is described in a short extract from the book Art and the Senses that also neatly sum­marises the var­i­ous ways that our taste per­cep­tion can be altered by our other senses:

The dis­am­bigua­tion of the flavour of a food dish can be achieved by a num­ber of means: either visu­ally, by chang­ing the colour of the food, ver­bally by means of labelling, by pre­sent­ing pic­tures or other cues on the pack­ag­ing, and/or by the pre­sen­ta­tion of audi­tory cues. […] Fur­ther­more, even say­ing the word ‘cin­na­mon’ has been shown to acti­vate the olfac­tory cor­tex (i.e. the part of the brain that processes smells). […] Play­ing the siz­zling bacon sound­track at the ‘Art and the Senses’ con­fer­ence may there­fore have influ­enced the audience’s per­cep­tion of the bacon flavour in the ice cream sim­ply by mak­ing them think of bacon. […] It is at present an open ques­tion as to whether sim­ply writ­ing the word bacon on the screen in the front of the audi­to­rium would have had the same effect.

Is there a name for this expe­ri­ence? The best I can come up with is ‘gus­ta­tory cross­modal­ity’, but that sounds far too excit­ing (and is most likely incor­rect). I’m hop­ing for a pithy, Gladwell-esque ‘Some­thing effect’.

via @mocost

Regard­ing all the foods that we con­sume as a drugs is a won­drous way to exam­ine and com­pre­hend the com­plex inter­ac­tions and sub­tle forces behind how every­thing we put in our mouths affects “how our neu­rons behave and, sub­se­quently, how we think and feel”.

In a com­pelling arti­cle that sug­gests our shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory with the plants and ani­mals that we eat is the root cause of them hav­ing an affect on our body’s behav­iour, Gary Wenk, author of Your Brain on Food, briefly describes how some of the chem­i­cals present in ‘drugs’ such as choco­late, bananas, alco­hol and nut­meg affect us:

We have all expe­ri­enced the con­se­quences of our shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory with the plants we eat. For exam­ple, unripe bananas con­tain the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter sero­tonin. When you eat an unripe banana, its sero­tonin is free to act upon the sero­tonin neu­rons within your diges­tive tract. The con­se­quence is likely to be increased acti­va­tion of the mus­cles in the wall of your intestines, usu­ally expe­ri­enced as diarrhea.

Many plants con­tain com­pounds that should be able to enhance your brain’s per­for­mance. For exam­ple, pota­toes, toma­toes, and egg­plants con­tain sola­nine and α-cha­co­nine, sub­stances that can enhance the action of acetyl­choline, a chem­i­cal in your brain that is vital to mem­ory for­ma­tion. Your mood might be enhanced slightly by eat­ing fava beans because they con­tain L-DOPA, a pre­cur­sor to the pro­duc­tion of dopamine, the reward chem­i­cal in your brain. Whether these food-borne com­pounds actu­ally affect your brain depends upon how much you con­sume and your own per­sonal phys­i­ol­ogy. This might explain why some peo­ple find it quite reward­ing to eat pota­toes or eggplants.

Morphine-like chem­i­cals capa­ble of act­ing upon the brain are pro­duced in your intestines when you con­sume milk, eggs, cheese, spinach, mush­rooms, pump­kin, and var­i­ous fish and grains. Dairy prod­ucts in par­tic­u­lar con­tain a pro­tein known as casein, which enzymes in your intestines can con­vert into beta-casomorphin. In new­borns, that beta-casomorphin can eas­ily pass out of the imma­ture gut and into the devel­op­ing brain to pro­duce euphoria.

There’s much more like that in the arti­cle, con­cluded with Wenk argu­ing that this shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory is why plants and ani­mals from other plan­ets will prob­a­bly not harm or sus­tain us if we ever travel to dis­tant, Earth-like bodies.

Drink­ing alco­hol — and the increased social cap­i­tal that it leads to — may not just be respon­si­ble for a pos­si­ble increase in life span; it may increase your earn­ings, too.

In an analy­sis of both the Gen­eral Social Sur­vey and the pub­lished lit­er­a­ture, researchers for the Rea­son Foun­da­tion show that alco­hol drinkers earn, on aver­age, 10% more than abstain­ers (pdf). This is known as the drinkers’ bonus.

Recent stud­ies indi­cate that drink­ing and indi­vid­ual earn­ings are pos­i­tively cor­re­lated. Instead of earn­ing less money than non­drinkers, drinkers earn more. One expla­na­tion is that drink­ing improves phys­i­cal health, which in turn affects earn­ings (Hamil­ton and Hamil­ton, 1997). We con­tend that there is an eco­nomic explanation. […]

Drinkers typ­i­cally tend to be more social than abstain­ers. As Cook (1991) explained, drink­ing is a social activ­ity, and one rea­son peo­ple drink is to be socia­ble. In the med­ical lit­er­a­ture, Skog (1980) showed that mod­er­ate drinkers have the strongest social networks. Furthermore, Leif­man et al. (1995) doc­u­mented a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship between social inte­gra­tion and absti­nence. Whether abstain­ers choose not to be as social or whether orga­niz­ers of social occa­sions involv­ing drink­ing exclude abstain­ers is unclear. Abstain­ers may pre­fer to inter­act with other abstain­ers or less social peo­ple. Alter­nately, abstain­ers might not be invited to social gath­er­ings, work-related or otherwise, because drinkers con­sider abstain­ers dull.

Cor­co­ran et al. (1980), Mont­gomery (1991), and Put­nam (2000) each made con­vinc­ing cases that social net­works are impor­tant for find­ing jobs and earn­ing pro­mo­tions. Mont­gomery (1991) explained that com­pa­nies pre­fer acquain­tances of employ­ees because employ­ees screen poten­tial can­di­dates and thereby reduce the cost of search. Approx­i­mately half the work­ers sur­veyed in the Panel Study of Income Dynam­ics found their job through friends or rel­a­tives, and one-third reported help from acquain­tances in obtain­ing their job (Cor­co­ran et al., 1980). There­fore, a per­son with more con­tacts will have more labor mar­ket options (Burt, 1997). Gra­novet­ter (1995) suggested that a large quan­tity of weak ties or friends-of-friends may be most impor­tant to gar­ner­ing the best job offers.

Thus, if social drink­ing enables greater social net­works, it will also increase earn­ings. In terms of search the­ory: the more one drinks, the more peo­ple one knows, and the more peo­ple one knows, the lower the mar­ginal costs of search.

The study is packed full of excel­lent ref­er­ences to pub­lished stud­ies (as you can tell from the above excerpt), so I sug­gest read­ing the acces­si­ble (and very short!) report. It’s also worth not­ing foot­notes four and five, describ­ing how this is just like all invest­ments in cap­i­tal, in that an opti­mal level exists: “you must drink more than 21 drinks per week to earn as lit­tle as a non-drinker”.

via @phila_lawyer

Despite the var­i­ous and severe health risks that come with drink­ing, abstain­ing from alco­hol appears to increase your risk of dying pre­ma­turely. The rea­sons for this are not clearly known, but it is thought to be because drinkers are more likely to belong to a com­mu­nity (albeit one that drinks), and a feel­ing of com­mu­nity is strongly cor­re­lated with hap­pi­ness and longevity.

Even after con­trol­ling for nearly all imag­in­able vari­ables — socioe­co­nomic sta­tus, level of phys­i­cal activ­ity, num­ber of close friends, qual­ity of social sup­port and so on — the researchers […] found that over a 20-year period, mor­tal­ity rates were high­est for those who were not cur­rent drinkers, regard­less of whether they used to be alco­holics, sec­ond high­est for heavy drinkers and low­est for mod­er­ate drinkers. […]

These are remark­able sta­tis­tics. Even though heavy drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with higher risk for cir­rho­sis and sev­eral types of can­cer (par­tic­u­larly can­cers in the mouth and esoph­a­gus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than peo­ple who don’t drink, even if they never had a prob­lem with alco­hol. One impor­tant rea­son is that alco­hol lubri­cates so many social inter­ac­tions, and social inter­ac­tions are vital for main­tain­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal health. […]

The authors of the new paper are care­ful to note that even if drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with longer life, it can be dan­ger­ous: it can impair your mem­ory severely and it can lead to non­lethal falls and other mishaps […] that can screw up your life. There’s also the depen­dency issue.

The cor­re­la­tions between alco­hol intake and var­i­ous health out­comes (both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive) is con­fus­ing and var­ied. A few things seem to be for sure: it can be good and it can be bad; no cau­sa­tion has been proven; and the effects dif­fer between the sexes.

Update: I for­got to link to the pub­lished study (Hola­han et al., 2010)… the Results sec­tion is the one worth perus­ing. For those with­out full access to the study (ahem), Over­com­ing Bias pro­vides the full list of con­trols.

Update: Jonah Lehrer dis­cusses this study in an arti­cle titled Why Alco­hol Is Good for You, empha­sis­ing the social side of drink­ing as the key to longevity.