Lone Gunman

Five neu­ro­sci­en­tists trav­elled into deep­est Glen Canyon, Utah, to con­tem­plate how tech­nol­ogy has changes their behav­iour. Some were scep­tics and some were believ­ers, and by tak­ing this forced break from their com­put­ers and gad­gets (there was no mobile phone recep­tion or power) they were deter­mined to find out whether or not mod­ern tech­nol­ogy inhibits their “deep thought” and can cause them anx­i­ety.

This bit of self-experimentation and cog­ni­tive reflec­tion is a bit too light on the con­clu­sions for my lik­ing, but this arti­cle, from The New York Times’ Unplugged series that exam­ines “how a del­uge of data can affect the way peo­ple think and behave”, does have this that’s worth think­ing about:

[By day three] the group has become more reflec­tive, qui­eter, more focused on the sur­round­ings. […]
The oth­ers are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against cof­fee, bypass­ing his usual rit­ual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cau­tions against read­ing too much into it. […]

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the trav­el­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing a stage of relax­ation he calls “third-day syn­drome.” Its symp­toms may be unsur­pris­ing. But even the more skep­ti­cal of the sci­en­tists say some­thing is hap­pen­ing to their brains that rein­forces their sci­en­tific dis­cus­sions — some­thing that could be impor­tant to help­ing peo­ple cope in a world of con­stant elec­tronic noise.

“If we can find out that peo­ple are walk­ing around fatigued and not real­iz­ing their cog­ni­tive poten­tial,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

“Third-day syn­drome”. I like that, and it rings true. Week­ends away to nearby cities don’t do it for me in terms of dis­en­gag­ing and allow­ing free thought; I need at least four days.

One more com­ment that was a bit too close for comfort:

Tech­nol­ogy has rede­fined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do peo­ple need to get infor­ma­tion and respond to it? The believ­ers in the group say the drum­beat of incom­ing data has cre­ated a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s abil­ity to focus.

Arti­cle and book pitches — both suc­cess­ful and unsuc­cess­ful — can give you a small insight into an editor’s selec­tion process and the sales-side of a writer’s mind, as well as help you learn to write more effec­tively. As such I’ve started to col­lect sites fea­tur­ing pro­pos­als and pitches.

A recent addi­tion to this list is the pitch data­base from The Open Note­book; a col­lec­tion of writer-submitted pitches for sci­ence arti­cles that have been accepted for pub­lish­ing in many of my favourite places, such as Ars Tech­nica, Atlantic, Lapham’s Quar­terly, This Amer­i­can Life and Wired.

Of par­tic­u­lar note is a pitch from David Dobbs, writer of the Neu­ron Cul­ture blog. Pitch­ing Atlantic edi­tor Don Peck, Dobbs wrote an exten­sive pitch for The Orchid Chil­dren that led to the pub­li­ca­tion of a fan­tas­tic arti­cle, The Sci­ence of Suc­cess. Those who fol­low Dobbs’ blog will know that this in turn led to a book deal for The Orchid and the Dan­de­lion, Dobbs’ forth­com­ing book.

Start­ing at 10^–25 sec­onds after the start of the uni­verse (infla­tion) and end­ing 10¹⁵ years later (with the ulti­mate fate of the uni­verse), the time­line of the uni­verse is an incom­pre­hen­si­bly long and fas­ci­nat­ing one. To help under­stand the forces that led to life as we know it and to get an idea of what’s going to hap­pen in the (dis­tant) future, the­o­ret­i­cal astro­physi­cist Ethan Siegel has bro­ken down the details in a won­der­fully acces­si­ble and enlight­en­ing com­plete his­tory of the uni­verse (with pictures!).

Those last cou­ple of steps on the time­line are par­tic­u­larly humbling:

100 bil­lion years: the Uni­verse has expanded so much that our local group, hav­ing merged into a giant ellip­ti­cal galaxy, is the only one left in the vis­i­ble Uni­verse!

We’ve got a long time left of stars going through the great cos­mic life-cycle, burn­ing their fuel, explod­ing, trig­ger­ing star for­ma­tion, and burn­ing their new fuel. But this is lim­ited; there’s only a finite amount of hydro­gen and other ele­ments to burn via nuclear fusion. The skies will even­tu­ally go com­pletely dark, as the last of the dim, red dwarf stars (the longest-lived ones) exhaust their fuel.

10¹⁵ years: the last bit of hydro­gen is burned up, and our entire Uni­verse goes dark, being pop­u­lated only by black holes, neu­tron stars, and degen­er­ate dwarf stars, which even­tu­ally them­selves cool, fade, and turn black.

And that’s the entire Uni­verse, from the very begin­ning of what we can sen­si­bly say about it to the far dis­tant future!

via @Foomandoonian

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.

Ear­lier this year the UK’s MHRA opened a con­sul­ta­tion to help them decide how home­o­pathic prod­ucts should be labelled when sold to the pub­lic. As expected, Ben Goldacre — devoted critic of home­opa­thy, pseu­do­science and gen­eral quack­ery — sug­gested a label of his own and asked his read­ers for fur­ther suggestions.

Some of the sug­ges­tions were truly fan­tas­tic (and proved that I couldn’t come up with an orig­i­nal joke, no mat­ter how hard I tried), and so Goldacre pub­lished some of the best sug­ges­tions for home­o­pathic labelling in his col­umn for The Guardian:

On instruc­tions, we have “take as many as you like”, since there are no ingre­di­ents. The pro­posed bel­ladonna home­opa­thy pill ingre­di­ents label sim­ply reads “no bel­ladonna”, which is a con­ven­tion the MHRA could adapt for all its dif­fer­ent home­opa­thy labels. Other sug­ges­tions include “none”, “belief”, “false hopes”, “shat­tered dreams”, and “the tears of unicorns”.

For warn­ings, we have: “not to be taken seri­ously”, “in case of over­dose, con­sult a life­guard”, and “con­tains chem­i­cals, includ­ing dihy­dro­gen monox­ide”. This, of course, is a scary name for water, which became an inter­net meme after Nathan Zohner’s school sci­ence project: he suc­cess­fully gath­ered a peti­tion to ban this chem­i­cal on the grounds that it is fatal when inhaled, con­tributes to the ero­sion of our nat­ural land­scape, may cause elec­tri­cal fail­ures, and has been found in the excised tumours of ter­mi­nal can­cer patients.

The com­ments on both arti­cles are real gems for those in need of a laugh today.

via @IrregularShed