The nose knows

The first few years my wife and I were married, we had a dog named Doolin.

At least I think Doolin was a dog.  The story is that she was born to the unholy union between a border collie and a bluetick coonhound, but there's credible evidence she was an alien infiltrator from the planet K-9, sent to study humans by pretending to be a humble house pet.  My observations suggested that she was far smarter than humans but had only recently mastered pretending to be a dog.  She is, far and away, the weirdest dog I've ever met, and I've had dogs pretty much my whole life.  She figured out how to unlatch our gates (and let herself out) by watching us; we ultimately had to put carabiners on the latches to stop her from going on walkies by herself.  She valiantly attempted to herd our four cats, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful.  Of her many odd habits, one of the funniest was that she was never without her favorite toy, a plush jack that she carried around in her mouth -- always pointing the same way.  (We tested this by taking it from her and sticking it in her mouth the other way 'round.  She dropped it, looked at us as if we'd lost our minds, and picked it up from the other direction.)

Doolin, with her jack toy sticking out of the right side of her mouth, as it obviously should be

One of Doolin's most curious traits was an extraordinary sensitivity to us, particularly to Carol.  She seemed to watch us continuously for cues about what was going on, and sensed when one of us was upset or feeling unwell.  Most strikingly, Doolin always knew when Carol was about to get a migraine.  Starting about a half-hour before the symptoms began, Doolin followed Carol around like her shadow, and if Carol sat down, Doolin smushed herself right up against her.  It got to be that Carol knew when to prep for a migraine once she saw Doolin acting weird (well, weirder than usual, which was admittedly a pretty high bar).

I used to think that people claiming their dogs had a second sense about how they (the owners) were feeling was an example of people anthropomorphizing, or at the very least, exaggerating their pets' intelligence and emotional sensitivity.  Until I had lived for a while with Doolin.

After that, a lot of the stories I'd heard began to seem a good bit more plausible.

Just this week, some research supported the contention with hard evidence.  A team of scientists in Belfast studied the responses of four dogs to breath and sweat samples from thirty-six volunteers, before and after doing a stressful exercise -- counting backwards from 9,000 by intervals of 17, without using calculators or pen and paper.  The researchers laid it on thick, telling the participants that it was very important to the study to do the counting exercise quickly and accurately.  A wrong answer got a shouted "No!", followed by being told the most recent correct response and an instruction to pick up from there.  For most of us, this would be a pretty high-stress activity, and would cause stress hormones (like cortisol and epinephrine) to pour into our bloodstreams.

And the breakdown products of those chemicals end up in our breath, sweat, and urine.  What's remarkable is that the four dogs, which had been conditioned to be able to discern between samples containing those breakdown products from ones which did not, correctly distinguished the post-stress breath and sweat samples from the pre-stress ones 93% of the time.

I know that our current dogs are pretty sensitive as well (although nowhere near the level of acuity that Doolin had).  Cleo, our Shiba Inu rescue, is really keyed in to me especially.  I had a couple of seriously high stress things happen in the last couple of months, and whenever I was really in freak-out mode, Cleo followed me around with a very worried expression on her face.  Her curly tail is like a barometer; the tighter the curl, the happier she is.  And when I was struggling, her tail was sagging.  Clearly an unhappy dog.

Cleo the Wonder Floof

So I guess all this stuff isn't our imagination.  Dogs really do sense our emotional states, not by some kind of canine telepathy, but because of plain old biochemistry coupled with an extraordinary sense of smell.

Although I wonder about Doolin.  I still think she was an alien spy, and was relaying information about us back to the Mother Ship.  Maybe the jack toy was some kind of transmitter, I dunno.

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Isolation and anxiety

Last September I took a job working half-time, providing companion care for a senior gentleman who lives in a full-care facility about twenty minutes' drive from where I live.  The work was easy -- mostly what he wanted to do was go for long walks -- and it helped replace a little bit of the income I lost when I retired from teaching.  It also got me out of the house, and (in my wife's words) kept me from turning into a complete recluse.

Then in November, I was furloughed because of the pandemic.

I was in the fortunate position that the financial hit of not working wasn't the dire situation it is for many.  The loss of my weekly paycheck didn't mean we would go without food or miss our mortgage payment.  What it did mean -- both for my client and me -- was that since then, we've been pretty well totally isolated.  My client still sees the nursing staff at the facility; and, to be clear about this, they are stupendous, doing their best to see not only to the physical but to the mental and emotional health of their residents.  For me, it's meant that other than occasional quick trips to the grocery store, the only person I see is my wife.

That's been the situation since the first week of November.

I honestly thought it would be easier for me to deal with isolation.  I'm an introvert by nature, and pretty shy and socially awkward at the best of times.  But the last few months have been dismal, with the fact of it being the middle of an upstate New York winter not helping matters.  I've been fighting bouts of depression and anxiety -- something I've dealt with all my life, but lately it's seemed a lot worse than my usual baseline.

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by the director of the facility.  Because I've been vaccinated against COVID, and the residents were also receiving their vaccines, they were reopening to non-essential visits, and my client was eager to resume our daily time together.  Yesterday was my first day back at work after being stuck at home, pretty much continuously, for four months.

This is where things get weird.  Because instead of it relieving my anxiety, it made it spike higher.  I'm talking, to nearly panic-attack levels.

In case this isn't clear enough, there is nothing rational about this reaction.  My client has some developmental disabilities, and frequently needs a lot of help and encouragement, but he's kind, funny, and a pleasure to be with.  The job itself is the opposite of stressful; the worst part of it is having to keep track of the paperwork required by the agency and the state.  Being stuck home made my anxiety worse; if anything made sense about this, you'd think being given the green light to work again would assuage it.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, though, I'm not alone in this rather counterintuitive reaction.  A paper last week in the journal Brain Sciences found that the social isolation a lot of us have experienced over the past year has caused a measurable spike in the levels of a hormone associated with stress called cortisol.  Cortisol is a multi-purpose chemical; it has a role in carbohydrate metabolism, behavior, resilience to emotional stressors, and reducing inflammation (cortisone, used for treating arthritis and joint injury, and topically for relieving skin irritations, is basically synthetic cortisol).  This last function is thought to be why long-term stress has a role in many inflammatory diseases, such as ulcers, acid reflux, and atherosclerosis; just as overconsumption of sugar can lead to the body losing its sensitivity to the hormone that regulates blood sugar (insulin), continuous stress seems to lower our sensitivity to cortisol, leading to increased inflammation.

Apropos of its role in emotional stress, the authors write:

There are important individual differences in adaptation and reactivity to stressful challenges.  Being subjected to strict social confinement is a distressful psychological experience leading to reduced emotional well-being, but it is not known how it can affect the cognitive and empathic tendencies of different individuals.  Cortisol, a key glucocorticoid in humans, is a strong modulator of brain function, behavior, and cognition, and the diurnal cortisol rhythm has been postulated to interact with environmental stressors to predict stress adaptation.  The present study investigates in 45 young adults (21.09 years old, SD = 6.42) whether pre-pandemic diurnal cortisol indices, overall diurnal cortisol secretion (AUCg) and cortisol awakening response (CAR) can predict individuals’ differential susceptibility to the impact of strict social confinement during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on working memory, empathy, and perceived stress.  We observed that, following long-term home confinement, there was an increase in subjects’ perceived stress and cognitive empathy scores, as well as an improvement in visuospatial working memory.  Moreover, during confinement, resilient coping moderated the relationship between perceived stress scores and pre-pandemic AUCg and CAR.

I thought it was pretty interesting that heightened cortisol has the effect of improving visuospatial working memory, but it makes sense if you think about it.  When a person is in a stressful situation, there's a benefit to being on guard, to keeping constant tabs on what's around you.  The downside, of course, is that such perpetual wariness is downright exhausting.

The last bit is also fascinating, if hardly surprising.  People who were capable of resilient coping with stress beforehand were less affected by the new emotional impact of being isolated; people like myself who were already struggling fared more poorly.  And interestingly, this was a pronounced enough response that it had a measurable effect on the levels of stress hormones in the blood.

This may explain my odd reaction to being taken off furlough.  Cortisol can be thought of as a sort of an "adrenaline for the long haul."  Adrenaline allows a fight-or-flight reaction in sudden emergencies, and has a rapid effect and equally rapid decline once the emergency is over.  Cortisol handles our response to long-duration stress -- and its effects are much slower to go away once the situation improves.  For people like myself who suffer from anxiety, it's like our brains still can't quite believe that we're no longer teetering over the edge of the cliff.  Even though things have improved, we still feel like we're one step from total ruin, and the added stressor of jumping back into a work situation when we've been safe at home for months certainly doesn't help.

In any case, yesterday's work day went fine.  As they always do.  I'm hoping that after a couple of weeks, my errant brain will finally begin to calm down once it realizes it doesn't have to keep me ramped up to red alert constantly.  It helps knowing I'm not alone in this reaction, and that there's a biochemical basis for it; that I'm not just making this up (something I was accused of pretty much every time I had an anxiety attack when I was a kid).

But it would also be nice if my brain would just think for a change.

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I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Stress test

These days, it's pretty critical to find a way to reduce your stress.

It's endemic in our culture.  Between the chaos and noise, the frustrating jobs, and the continuing parade of bad news in the media, it'd be surprising if you weren't stressed.  And ongoing stress is linked to an increase in the hormone cortisol, long-term high levels of which are in turn connected to inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis and acid reflux disorder, and according to some studies, to dementia.

So reducing stress is pretty important, not just in the here-and-now to make your life more enjoyable, but to improve your chances at a healthy future.  So that's why I thought the research from Drexel University I read a couple of days ago was so interesting.

The paper "Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making," by Girija Kaimal, Kendra Ray, and Juan Muniz, appeared in the journal Art Therapy, and reports that the researchers found a reduction in cortisol levels in participants after spending only forty-five minutes making art -- a result that was irrespective of whether the participant had any prior experience as an artist.

"It was surprising and it also wasn’t," Kaimal said.  "It wasn’t surprising because that’s the core idea in art therapy: Everyone is creative and can be expressive in the visual arts when working in a supportive setting.  That said, I did expect that perhaps the effects would be stronger for those with prior experience."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Kaimal did report that a quarter of the subjects showed an increase in cortisol after making art.  Of this result, she said, "Some amount of cortisol is essential for functioning.  For example, our cortisol levels vary throughout the day — levels are highest in the morning because that gives us an energy boost to us going at the start of the day.  It could’ve been that the art-making resulted in a state of arousal and/or engagement in the study’s participants."

I would also suggest that it's possible the elevated cortisol may have come from frustration, although Kaimal reports that most of the test subjects reported feeling better and more relaxed after the experience, whatever their cortisol levels said.  I can vouch for the frustrations that making art can engender; some years ago, on the urging of my wife, I signed up for a pottery class, and have kept up the hobby since then despite the fact that I have the artistic ability that God gave gravy.  My first attempts looked like ceramics that were either created by a four-year-old or possibly an unusually intelligent chimp.  After four or five years, I was able to turn out pieces that were marginally better, but still looked like they might have gotten Honorable Mention in the sixth-grade art show.  And along the way, I experienced moments of enjoyment and stress-reduction interspersed with long stretches of wanting to fling the lump of clay at the nearest wall.

But I'm kind of a high-stress person anyhow, so maybe my experience isn't typical.  And it bears mention that I have high standards to live up to.  My wife is a professional artist (check out her work here if you want to be amazed), my dad made jewelry and gorgeous stained-glass windows, my mother was an oil painter and a porcelain artist, my older son is a talented cartoonist and caricaturist, and my younger son works full-time as a glassblower.  Somehow in all that, the Art Gene missed me, although in my own defense I can say with some confidence that I have excellent working copies of the Music Gene and the Fiction Writing Gene.

In any case, it's an interesting study.  As I said earlier, anything we can do to reduce the stress and anxiety in our lives is worthwhile.  And who knows?  Maybe I should give more of a chance to art.  Sign up for a painting class or something.  After ten years' practice, maybe I'd be able to do something more than a lopsided house with a yellow smiley-face as a sun.

Or maybe I should just go play the piano.

Silence is golden

Odd to say, for a veteran high school teacher, but I am not someone who thrives in a noisy, chaotic environment.

I can tolerate it for a while, and then I have a number of (often quite sudden) reactions.  First, I get a jolt of tension, sometimes manifesting as a physically painful clench in my stomach.  Second, I lose the ability to process voices individually -- something that is most striking in a crowded pub, where the voice of the person I'm talking to, sitting right next to, vanishes into a uniform, overwhelming Wall of Sound within which I can distinguish nothing at all.

Third, I feel like running away.

Turns out I'm not alone.  Some studies in the last couple of years have elucidated the restorative role of silence -- something all too few of us get to experience.  At least when I'm done at school, I can go home to my quiet house on a rural road, and immerse myself in something close to complete quiet.  But I can't imagine what it'd be like to live in a big city.

I think I'd go mad, honestly.

A 2013 study by Imke Kirste et al. of the Research Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden, Germany found a neurological underpinning to our desire for silence.  Baby mice exposed to various sorts of noise (music, white noise, the human voice, the vocalizations of other mice) showed, as you would expect, varying responses in terms of growth and interconnectedness of brain cells, levels of stress hormones, and so on.  What was surprising was that the group which was supposed to be the control -- a group of baby mice kept in total silence -- exhibited a statistically significant improvement in growth over any of the others in the number of new neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation.

Silence, by sculptor Alix Marquet (1921) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It doesn't just work with mice.  A study by Arline Bronzaft, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that installing noise-reduction technology in P. S. 93, a public school in the Bronx that was located very close to elevated railroad tracks, resulted in a significant uptick in student reading scores -- and, most tellingly, an equalization of scores in classes on the side of the building facing the tracks with the ones that were further away.

Then there's the study by Allyson Green et al. that appeared in the Journal of Residential and Environmental Public Health in 2015 that went even further, showing that noise was positively correlated with cortisol levels in a gold-mining community in Ghana.  Cortisol is not only a stress hormone, it's a natural anti-inflammatory; repeated long-term exposure to high blood levels of cortisol causes a receptor-weakening effect much like high sugar diet does in type-2 diabetes, with the result that inflammation all over the body increases.  Years of high cortisol levels have been associated with heart disease, ulcers, and arthritis -- so it's hard on you physically, not to mention the obvious psychological toll it takes.

What's most frightening about all of this is how much we've come simply to accept the amount of noise in our lives.  As much as I like listening to music on the radio, sometimes on my way home from work I have to switch it off -- I'm still too overwhelmed by the noise I experienced in the school to subject myself to more sounds (albeit pleasant enough ones) on my drive home.  But I'm struck then by how much noise the tires and engine make.  Even when we think we're in quiet, we seldom actually are -- and we view it as inevitable and unavoidable.

And we're so often unaware of it.  Look at how instantaneously you're aware of it when the power goes out, even in the daytime.  The sudden cessation of the noise of heaters, refrigerators, air conditioners, and so on can be as startling as a thunderclap.

It's getting worse, too.  Studies have concluded that the amount of ambient noise doubles roughly every thirty years -- outstripping population growth.  A 2015 study by Matthew Zawadski, Heather Costigan, and Joshua Smyth of Pennsylvania State University found that test subjects had a lower cortisol spike in their saliva (an indicator of stress) if they had a period of quiet and leisure prior to a high-stress activity (such as giving a speech to an unfriendly audience).  Being around turmoil and noise for extended periods of time leaves us less able to cope with the difficulties, large and small, that we face every day.

Me, I'm all about giving a try to having more silence in my life.  Maybe you'll give it a try, too -- turn off the radio, take out the earbuds, find a way to get out of the chaos of the city for a while.  Let me know what happens -- if the studies are correct, it should do you nothing but good.

Gaming the brain

I think all of us can relate to the desire to have our brains work better.

We forget things.  We get distracted.  We let worry keep us from enjoying our days and from sleeping at night.  And that's not even counting the more serious problems that some of us have to deal with -- depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia... the list goes on and on.

So it's only to be expected that we're attracted to anything that promises to help us out in the Mental Faculties Department.  This has given rise to companies like Lumosity, which use a variety of brain-stimulating games to activate your neural circuitry -- and, the claim goes, trigger an overall improvement in your mental acuity.

The problem is, they don't work as advertised.  Playing a brain game improves one thing and one thing only -- your ability to play that game.  This was the finding of a study that was published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, and describes work by seven researchers headed by Daniel J. Simons, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Disturbingly, not only did Simons's team find little in the way of positive results, they found poor experimental design in previous studies that had found such results.  Simons et al. write:

Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.  We also find that many of the published intervention studies had major shortcomings in design or analysis that preclude definitive conclusions about the efficacy of training, and that none of the cited studies conformed to all of the best practices we identify as essential to drawing clear conclusions about the benefits of brain training for everyday activities.

Simons agrees that it's a discouraging result.  "It’s disappointing that the evidence isn’t stronger," Simons said in an interview in Science Around Michigan.  "It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities, but the studies don’t show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that weren't bad enough, a couple of weeks ago there was an announcement from a researcher that another brain-improvement strategy -- "power poses" -- also shows little effect.  This one achieved wide acclaim when one of its chief proponents, social psychologist Amy Cuddy, spoke about it on one of the most watched TED talks -- at present, it's been viewed over 36 million times.  The idea is that adopting a body pose of strength and courage affects your hormone levels (especially testosterone and cortisol), which then feeds back and positively affects your mood and anxiety levels; likewise, adopting a submissive or weak pose generates the opposite effects. 

The problem is, attempts in January to replicate Cuddy's experiments failed to generate results, and (most damning of all) one of the co-authors of the original study, Dana Carney, has stated outright that "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real."  She said the original study made use of the statistical fudging technique called "p-hacking," which (to oversimplify, but give you the general gist) amounts to running a variety of tests and only reporting on the ones that generated positive results.

All of which is not intended to stop you from playing brain games or doing power poses.  I still think there's something to be said for thinking positively, and if you approach life playfully and optimistically you're much more likely to enjoy it and (therefore) be successful at what you do.  (As my dad used to say, I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right.)

But as far as actual measurable results in cognition, memory, or hormone levels?  Apparently not.  Which is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising.  Our brains are tremendously complex organs, and it's always struck me as a little unlikely that powerful neural firing patterns could be so readily malleable.  As usual, the simplistic approach seems to be appealing... but wrong.