Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Turning the focus knob

I am really distractible.

To say I have "squirrel brain" is a deep injustice to squirrels.  At least squirrels have the focus to accomplish their purpose every day, which is to make sure our bird feeders are constantly empty.  If I was a squirrel, I'd probably clamber my way up the post and past the inaccurately-named "squirrel baffle" and finally get to the feeder, and then just sit there with a puzzled look, thinking, "Why am I up here, again?"

My "Oh, look, something shiny" approach to life has at least a few upsides.  I tend to make weird connections between things really fast, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia probably know all too well.  If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, England > Cornwall > Tintagel > King Arthur > Monty Python > the "bring out yer dead" scene > the Black Death > mass burials > a weird study I read a while back about how nettle plants need high calcium and phosphorus soils, so they're often found where skeletons have decomposed, and I'll say, cheerfully, "Did you know that nettles are edible?  You can cook 'em like spinach," and it makes complete sense to me even though everyone else in the room is giving me a look like this:

Talking to me is like the conversational equivalent of riding the Tilt-O-Whirl.

Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.

A more significant downside, though, is that my inability to focus makes it really hard in noisy or chaotic environments.  When I'm in a crowded restaurant or bar, I can pay attention for a while to what the people I'm with are saying, but there comes a moment -- and it usually does happen quite suddenly -- when my brain just goes, "Nope.  Done," and the entire thing turns into a wall of white noise in which I'm unable to pick out a single word.  

All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.

However, as a study last week in Nature Human Behavior shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a lot of us find daunting.  And, most encouragingly, that capacity for focus is not related to intelligence.  "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" said Harrison Ritz, of Brown University, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "[Our] findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time.  It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."

The researchers ran volunteers through a battery of cognitive tests while hooked up to fMRI machines, to observe what parts of their brain were involved in mental coordination and filtering.  In one of them, they had to estimate the percentage of purple dots in a swirling maelstrom of mixed purple and green dots -- a task that makes me anxious just thinking about it.  The researchers found two parts of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, that seemed to be involved in the task, but each was functioning in different ways.

"You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering," Ritz said.  "In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what's going on with the dots.  When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.

"In the scenario where the purple and green dots are almost at 50/50, it might also direct the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob in order to increase the sensitivity to color.  Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the appropriate color, so the participant is better able to make the correct selection."

The applications to understanding disorders like ADHD are obvious, although of course identifying the parts of the brain that are responsible is only the beginning.  The question then becomes, "But what do you do about it?", and the truth is that current treatments for ADHD are a crapshoot at best.  Even so, it'd have been nice if this understanding had come sooner -- it might have saved me from being told by my third grade teacher, unkindly if accurately, "You have the attention span of a gnat."

I apparently haven't changed much, because recalling this comment made me go, gnats > a scene in one of Carlos Castaneda's books where the main character was high on mushrooms and hallucinated a giant man-eating gnat > edible mushrooms, which my wife hates > food preferences > licorice, another thing a lot of people hate > a study I read about using licorice extract to treat psoriasis.

Hey, did you know that the word psoriasis comes from the Greek word ψώρα, meaning "itch"?  I bet you didn't know that.

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The voice of nature

Yesterday I wrote about my difficulty with maintaining concentration.  My mind's tendency to wander has been with me all my life, and at after sixty years of fighting with it I'm beginning to think it always will be.  This, coupled with an unfortunate history of not sticking with things long if I don't see quick results, has been why my attempts to make a practice of meditation have, all things considered, been failures.

I've had more than one person recommend meditation and mindfulness training as a means for combatting depression, anxiety, and insomnia, all of which I struggle with.  I even did a six-week mindfulness training course three years ago, thinking that if perhaps I learned some strategies for dealing with my errant brain, I might be more successful.  But even training didn't seem to be able to fix the fact that when I meditate, I nearly always veer off either into an anxiety attack or else fall asleep.  Steering a middle course -- being relaxed and tranquil enough to gain some benefit from it, but not so relaxed and tranquil that I lose consciousness -- just never seemed to be within my grasp.

Part of my problem is that I have a loud internal voice,  I know we all deal with internal chatter, but mine has the volume turned up to eleven.  And it's not even interesting chatter, most of the time.  I sometimes have looped snippets of songs, usually songs I hate.  (Last week, I woke up at two AM with the song "Waterloo" by Abba running through my head.  God alone knows why.  I don't even like that song during the day.)  Sometimes it's just completely random musings, like while I was running yesterday and pondering how weird the word "aliquot" is.  (For you non-science folks, it means "a sample" -- as in, "transfer a 3.5 ml aliquot of the solution to a test tube."  I also found out, because I was still thinking about it later and decided to look it up, that it comes from a Latin word meaning "some.")

So most of the time, my brain is like a horse that's always on the verge of spooking, throwing its rider, and then running off a cliff.

The topic comes up because of a paper that appeared this week in the journal Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, which found that the old technique used for combatting distraction during meditation -- to focus on your breath -- simply doesn't work well for some people.  Not only is it an ongoing battle, a lot of people have the same problem I did, which is taking those mindfulness skills and then applying them during the ordinary activities of the day.

In "Exploring Mindfulness Attentional Skills Acquisition, Psychological and Physiological Functioning and Well-being: Using Mindful Breathing or Mindful Listening in a Nonclinical Sample," by Leong-Min Loo, Jon Prince, and Helen Correia, we read about a study of 79 young adults who were trained in mindfulness and meditation techniques -- but for some of them, they were instructed in the traditional "return to your breath if you get distracted" method, and others were told to focus on external sounds like quiet recorded music or sounds of nature.  Interestingly, the ones who were told to focus on external sounds not only reported fewer and shorter episodes of distraction during meditation, they reported greater ease in using those techniques during their ordinary daily activities -- and also reported lower symptoms of depression and anxiety afterward than the group who mediated in silence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons anonym, Bronze figure of Kashmiri in Meditation by Malvina Hoffman Wellcome M0005215, CC BY 4.0]

What's funny is I was just thinking about the idea of soothing sounds a couple of days ago, when I participated in one of those silly online quizzes.  One of the questions was, "What are your favorite sounds?" -- and after I rattled off a few, I realized that all but one of them were natural sounds.  Thunder.  Wind in the trees.  The dawn chorus of birds in spring.  A hard rain striking the roof.  Ocean waves.  (The only one on my list that wasn't natural was "distant church bells at night" -- a sound that reminds me of when I was nine and lived with my grandma for a year, and every evening heard the beautiful and melancholy sound of the bells of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Broussard, Louisiana, rising and falling with the breeze.)

So maybe it's time to try meditation again, but using some recordings of natural sounds to aid my focus.  I know I'll still have to combat my brain's tendency to yell absurd and random stuff at me, and also my unfortunate penchant for giving up on things too easily.  But something external to focus on seems like it might help a bit, at least with the attentional part of it.

And lord help me, if it purges "Waterloo" from my brain, it'll be worthwhile regardless.

***********************************

I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

****************************************

These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

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

Run to the museum

Two recent studies suggest the popular wisdom that if you want to improve your health, mood, and sense of well-being, get out and do stuff, is substantially correct.

The first is (to me) the more impressive study, because it actually looked at the electrical output of the test subjects' brains, so we're seeing at least a hint of the underlying mechanism.  In "Play Sports for a Quieter Brain: Evidence From Division I Collegiate Athletes," which appeared in the journal Sports Health last Monday, a team of neuroscientists at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) found that the FFR (frequency-following response, a measure of neural crosstalk between the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting complex sensory stimuli) was substantially higher in athletes than non-athletes, and increased in both groups after strenuous exercise.

The authors suggest that the higher FFR in athletes occurs because sports in general require focused attention, thus a diminishment of the "neural background noise" all our brains engage in.  The ability to turn down this chatter and devote more energy and brain activity to sensory interpretation could certainly explain how athletes develop their preternaturally fast and accurate reflexes.

It also explains something that I've witnessed more than once, as a fan of Cornell University hockey.  The Cornell students are notorious for their jeers -- um, cheers -- that make fun of the opposing team in any way that is convenient.  In particular, the opposing goalie is ridiculed incessantly (starting, but not ending, with referring to him as a "sieve"), but almost always the goalie is capable of somehow shutting out the roar of insults coming from the student section.  I've always wondered how they did that so effectively -- almost never do the goalies even react, much less try to interact, with the students.  They seem entirely undistracted by it.

But the Sports Health study suggests that a laser-like focus is a neural feature of a lot of athletes, so well-developed that it shows up on an electroencephalogram.  I still wonder, of course, if we're not mistaking correlation for causation -- it could just as easily be that people are attracted to sports because they already have the ability to focus and ignore neural background noise, rather than playing sports causing that ability to develop.

Either way, it's an interesting study, deserving of more research -- especially if it could be demonstrated that engagement in sports improved neural focus, which would give some hope to ordinary mortals like myself who like to run but get distracted if a squirrel farts.

The other study I present with the same qualifier; the convenient conclusion could well be a correlation/causation error.  Still, it's an interesting finding.  In "The Art of Life and Death: 14 Year Follow-Up Analyses of Associations Between Arts Engagement and Mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing," which appeared this week in the British Medical Journal, researchers at University College of London found that engagement with the arts -- even something like regular museum visits -- was correlated with a lower risk of mortality from all causes, even when they controlled for age, prior health conditions, and socioeconomic status.

The study followed six thousand British citizens, all aged fifty or over, for fifteen years, and the differences in survival rate were not small.  Individuals who were occupied in some way with the arts had a 31% lower mortality rate than those who did not.  The mechanism is uncertain, although there have been other studies that correlated brain activity of all kinds (even doing crossword puzzles or sudoku) with a lower rate of dementia.  The naysayer in my mind, however, feels compelled to point out that it could be that people with conditions that will ultimately prove fatal -- even before they're diagnosed -- might be less compelled to go out and take sketching classes than those who are (unbeknownst to them) facing long-term good health.  Just as in the crossword puzzle studies; there is some indication that horrifying disorders like Alzheimer's start to show in measurable ways far earlier than anyone thought, so it's understandable that someone who is starting the slide into losing his/her cognitive faculties wouldn't be inclined to do a crossword puzzle even if they're not consciously aware yet that the decline has begun.

But still.  It could be the other way around, which is certainly how the popular media is portraying it.  And there's nothing to be lost in buying a year's worth of museum passes, or signing up for that sculpture class you've been considering; just as with the other study I referenced, there's nothing but benefit to joining an intramural soccer league or a running club.  Keeping physically and mentally active certainly improves your quality of life, and even if you won't end up with the focused attention of a Cornell hockey goalie or living to age 103, it's still worth doing.

So I suppose that means that I should get my ass up out of this chair, turn the computer off, and go for a run.  Or work on the clay mask I've been making for the last couple of days.  Either is probably preferable than sitting here immersing myself in the news, which has been my fallback, and is not good for either my mood or my blood pressure lately.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

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