Setting the gears in motion

A couple of weeks ago, I was out for a run on a local trail, and I almost stepped on a snake.

Fortunately, here in upstate New York, we don't have any poisonous snakes.  Unlike in my home state of Louisiana, where going for a trail run is taking your life into your hands.  It was just a garter snake, common and completely harmless, but it startled the hell out of me even though I like snakes.  What's interesting, though, is that in mid-stride I did a sudden course correction without even being consciously aware of it, put my foot down well to the snake's left (fortunately for it), and kept going with barely a stumble.  I was another three paces ahead when my conscious brain caught up and said, "Holy shit, I almost stepped on a snake!"

Thanks for the lightning-fast assessment of the situation, conscious brain.

It's kind of amazing how fast we can do these sorts of adjustments, and some recent research at the University of Michigan suggests that we do them better while running -- and more interesting still, we get better at it the faster we run.

Running apparently triggers a rapid interchange of information between the right and left sides of the brain.  It makes sense; when you run, the two sides of your body (and thus the two sides of your brain) have to coordinate precisely.  Or at least they have to if you're trying to run well.  I've seen runners who look like they're being controlled by a team of aliens who only recently learned how the human body works, and still aren't very good at it.  "Okay, move left leg forward... and move the right arm back at the same time!... No, I mean forward!  Okay, now right leg backward... um... wait..."  *crash*  "Dammit, get him up off the ground and try it again, and do it right this time!"

But to run efficiently requires that you coordinate the entire body, and do it fast.  (In fact, a 2014 study found that a proper arm swing rhythm during running creates a measurable improvement in efficiency.)  The University of Michigan study that was published this week identified a particular kind of neural cross-talk between the two brain hemispheres when you run.  They call these patterns "splines" (because they look like the interlocking teeth of a gear wheel) and found that the faster you run, the more intense the splines get.

"Previously identified brain rhythms are akin to the left brain and right brain participating in synchronized swimming: The two halves of the brain try to do the same thing at the exact same time," said Omar Ahmed, who led the study.  "Spline rhythms, on the other hand, are like the left and right brains playing a game of very fast—and very precise—pingpong.  This back-and-forth game of neural pingpong represents a fundamentally different way for the left brain and right brain to talk to each other."

Me and some other folks at a race last month, splining like hell

"These spline brain rhythms are faster than all other healthy, awake brain rhythms," said Megha Ghosh, who co-authored the paper.  "Splines also get stronger and even more precise when running faster.  This is likely to help the left brain and right brain compute more cohesively and rapidly when an animal is moving faster and needs to make faster decisions."

More fascinating still is that the researchers found spline rhythms during one other activity: dreaming during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep.  So this could be yet another function of dreams -- rehearsing the coordinating rhythms between the two brain hemispheres, so that the pathways are well established when you need them while you're awake.  

"Surprisingly, this back-and-forth communication is even stronger during dream-like sleep than it is when animals are awake and running," Ahmed said.  "This means that splines play a critical role in coordinating information during sleep, perhaps helping to solidify awake experiences into enhanced long-term memories during this dream-like state."

So that's the latest news from the intersection of two of my obsessions, neuroscience and running.  It'll give me something to think about in a few minutes when I go out for my morning run.  Maybe it'll distract me from obsessively scanning the trail for snakes.

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

Golden years gold medal

You've probably heard the old joke about a man going in for major surgery.  "Doc," he says, right before the anesthetic is administered, "I gotta ask... after this surgery, will I be able to play the piano?"

The surgeon smiles reassuringly and says, "Of course you will."

"Awesome!" the man says.  "I've always wanted to play the piano!"

That's what came to mind when I read an article in Science called, "Will You Keep Winning Races Into Old Age?  Your Cells Hold Clues," by Tess Joosse.  I'm hoping that like the aspiring pianist, old age will put me into the winner's bracket, because since I started running semi-competitively forty years ago, I've yet to win a race.  I train, I run regularly, but I'm still (and probably always will be) a solid middle-of-the-packer.  The closest I've ever come was about three years ago, when I came in third in my age group.

To be scrupulously honest, there were only six people in my age group.  But I'll take my little victories wherever I can get them.

Me last year, about to not cross the finish line first

Be that as it may, I'm still in there trying.  I'm 61, and I know that regular exercise is essential not only for continuing physical health but mental wellbeing.  In fact, on June 8 I'm running in the Ithaca Twilight 5K, a wonderful race down the footpaths along Cayuga Lake, and because I'm recovering from a series of health setbacks I've lowered my sights to simply getting across the finish line without having to be carted over it in a wheelbarrow.

Even though the "will you keep winning?" part of the headline of the article struck me as funny, the research itself is pretty cool.  Russell Hepple, a biologist at the University of Florida, wondered what was going on with people who are still competitive racers even into old age -- such as his father-in-law, who holds the record time for an eighty-year-old in the Boston Marathon.  Hepple and his colleagues did an assay on the muscle tissue of world-class senior athletes and a group of non-athletes, and found no fewer than eight hundred proteins that were produced in amounts that were significantly different between the two groups.  Some were higher in the athletes; others were lower.  But one obvious patterns was that over half of the proteins the study found were ones that are expressed by, or otherwise affect, the mitochondria.

For some reason, the factoid "the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell" is one that sticks in the minds of just about everyone who has taken high school biology, but the way they work is actually pretty amazing.  Your mitochondria are actually symbiotic single-celled life-forms living inside your cells -- they even have their own DNA -- and they have evolved a complex series of chemical reactions (collectively known as aerobic cellular respiration) to break down glucose and store its energy in a molecule called ATP, which is the direct driver of damn near every process living things do.  The amount of ATP created and the rate at which it's used are in an incredibly tight balance; it's estimated that you produce (and consume/recycle) your body weight in ATP every day, which amounts to ten million ATP molecules per second, per cell.

So it's no surprise that octogenarian racers have better mitochondrial function than the rest of us slobs.  In fact, the study found that 176 of the proteins studied were unique to elite senior athletes; how much of that is because of a lucky combination of genes, and how much is because their continuous training has triggered protein production that in non-athletes tapers off or stops entirely, isn't known.

Also an open question is whether administering one or more of these proteins would boost aerobic exercise capacity in older people who aren't athletes (but would like to be).  Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging, who co-authored the study, has proposed trying this in mice and seeing if it does increase endurance and stamina, without any untoward side effects.

In any case, I suspect that no matter what I do, I'll never be a gold medalist.  That's okay with me.  I love running for running's sake, and the race community (at least around here) is super supportive of everyone regardless of their level.  (At a race I was in a while back, a twelve-year-old boy had posted himself just past the finish line, and was high-fiving each runner as they crossed.  When I stumbled my way across, he grinned at me and said, "Well done, Shirtless Tattoo Guy!"  That, to me, encapsulates the spirit of racing in my area.)

But I'll be interested to see where this research leads.  Anything I can do to stave off decline (physical or mental) as I get older is a good thing.  Until then, though, I'll keep running, and keep being okay with finishing in the middle of the pack.

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

There's the rub

I'm currently benched from one of my favorite activities: running.

I have, once again, injured my back.  Four years ago, I got sciatica -- inflammation of the sciatic nerve -- that sidelined me for almost a year before it really had resolved enough that I could run again.  It's returned, probably due to my hefting around twenty-five kilogram bags of rock salt for our water softener a couple of weeks ago.  Like last time, there was no "uh-oh" moment, when I felt a twinge or a jolt; but the next day, I went for an easy four-mile run and ended up limping my way home.

At least it's on the opposite side this time, although I'm not honestly sure it's any better to injure new and different body parts than it is to keep re-injuring the same one over and over.

Seriously discouraging, mostly because I'm anticipating this thing once again taking a long time to heal.  I work with a kickass trainer, Kevin, who has informed me that he is not going to let me give up.  He's had issues with his back as well, so he knows the drill -- and knows things to do that will help.  Stretching, heating pads, using a TENS (trans-cutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit.  I've had suggestions from other people -- chiropractic and acupuncture topping the list -- but I've hesitated to go that direction, because from what I've read, neither one has been shown effective for treating injuries, and in fact there are cases of chiropractic adjustment making things worse.

So I'm following what Kevin says to do, and I'm seeing some gradual improvement.  Not nearly as fast as I'd like, but still, progress is progress.  I am not a patient person, and I'm very ready to get myself out there racing again.

This is why I was very interested to read some research out of Harvard University this week supporting the claim that another commonly-used recovery technique -- massage -- apparently does have a positive therapeutic effect, beyond just feeling good.  A team led by Bo Ri Seo, of the Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering, did an experiment with mice that not only showed massage speeds up healing, but gives a clue as to why it works.

Neutrophils are a type of white blood cell associated with inflammation; inflamed tissue produces chemical signals called cytokines, which acts to increase blood flow (thus the swelling associated with inflammation) and attract neutrophils to clear out the damaged tissue.  So this response is critical for initiating healing both in cases of infection and in mechanical injuries.

Which is all very well, up to a point.  "Neutrophils are known to kill and clear out pathogens and damaged tissue, but in this study we identified their direct impacts on muscle progenitor cell behaviors," said study co-author Stephanie McNamara.  "While the inflammatory response is important for regeneration in the initial stages of healing, it is equally important that inflammation is quickly resolved to enable the regenerative processes to run its full course."

The team worked with mice, and developed a little "massage gun" to exert regular, rhythmic pressure on their tiny muscles.  What they found was that the mechanical compression from a massage forces out both the neutrophils and the cytokines from damaged tissue, allowing them to heal not only faster, but stronger.  The rebuilt muscle tissue had thicker fibers, and also more fibers of the type involved with greater force production during contraction.

"These findings are remarkable because they indicate that we can influence the function of the body's immune system in a drug-free, non-invasive way," said team member Conor Walsh.  "This provides great motivation for the development of external, mechanical interventions to help accelerate and improve muscle and tissue healing that have the potential to be rapidly translated to the clinic."

So I think I need to schedule a massage.  With luck and diligence, maybe I can get back out on the trail soon.  I certainly hope so; running is a real pressure-valve for me emotionally, and if I'm stuck on the sidelines until next summer like last time this happened, I'm gonna go out of my ever-lovin' mind.

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

As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Little fish

I had an interesting, and rather revelatory, experience this summer.

One of my passions is running.  Well, to be more accurate, I like having run.  While I'm out there, slogging up the hills and dripping sweat, I am most frequently asking myself why the hell I do this, when it is clearly painful, exhausting, and generally unpleasant.  But afterward I always feel better, and every time I've raced I come home and signed up for more races.

As a friend of mine put it, it's a little like the guy who smacks his head on the wall because it feels so good when he stops.

In any case, in May I signed up for the One New York Challenge, a five-hundred-kilometer "virtual race" across New York, the proceeds from which were donated to COVID research.  We had from May 15 to August 31 to finish, and there was a leaderboard that was updated daily to keep track of everyone's submitted mileage and times, so you could see how you ranked against other participants.

Well, this is where the trouble started.  Because I'm not all that great at running -- I'll be up-front about that -- but I am insanely competitive.  So every day I'd enter my miles (I run an average five miles a day, pretty much without exception), then immediately log on to the leaderboard to see how -- or if -- my place had shifted.

I ended up finishing the race way ahead of the deadline, with over a month to spare, crossing the finish line in 827th place overall (out of 6,428 participants), and in 30th place (out of 151) in my age class.

Me after finishing the 499th kilometer

So reason to be proud, right?  Not only finishing the race, but in the top fifteen percent out of everyone and in the top twenty percent in my age class.

But all I could focus on was thinking, "Holy shit.  826 people were faster than me."

Turns out I'm not alone in doing this, self-defeating as it is.  A study this week in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that we feel much better about ourselves when we're big fish in a little pond than when we're little fish in a big pond -- even if our own skill level is the same in both situations.

In "Taking Social Comparison to the Extremes: The Huge-Fish-Tiny-Pond Effect in Self-Evaluations," by Ethan Zell and Tara Lesick of the University of North Carolina, we find out that we pay much closer attention to our in-group ranking (whatever the size and skill level of the group) than we do to how the whole group ranks against other groups.  Put a different way, most of us are much happier ranking higher amongst peers who as a whole are mediocre than ranking lower amongst the elite.

And doesn't just affect our emotional states, it affects how we actually evaluate our own skill level.  The setup of the experiment involved the administration of a verbal-reasoning test to students at a variety of colleges.  Participants were given their scores, and two other pieces of information; how they ranked against other participants from their own college, and how their college ranked against other colleges.  Afterward, each volunteer was asked how they felt about their performance, and to evaluate their own verbal-reasoning ability not just against their peers but in a general, global sense.

Naturally, high scorers at highly-ranked colleges were not only happy with their performance, but felt pretty confident about their skill.  More interesting were the high scorers at low-ranked colleges, and the low scorers at highly-ranked colleges.  The former had the same glowing assessment of their own skills and performance as the high scorers at highly-ranked colleges, while the latter were generally disappointed with their skills and performance -- even when the overall scores of the members of the two groups were similar.

It makes sense, I suppose, given our long history of tribalism.  If Zog is competing against Thak in boulder-throwing, his rival's performance is right there in front of him, immediate and obvious.  It's way less obvious (and often much less important in the here-and-now) if Zog's whole tribe is made up of elite boulder-throwers or if, to put it bluntly, they suck.  I know it's always thin ice to attribute psychological tendencies to evolutionary history, but there's a good argument that the disappointment of the little-fish-big-pond experience is built into our brains by our having evolved living in small, tightly-knit groups.

In my own experience, being a mediocre racer in a very large group slowed me down for a bit, but (fortunately) hasn't stopped me.  Three weeks ago I started a new challenge; to run four hundred miles in 108 days.  (Five hundred kilometers -- 310 miles -- was apparently not enough, for some reason.)  It's for a good cause -- my sign-up money goes to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  And there's swag to look forward to when I'm done, including another badly-needed race t-shirt, to add to the 793 race t-shirts I already own.

Twenty days in, I've already got 25% of the miles completed.  I'm currently 192nd overall (out of 1,716 participants) and 8th in my age class (out of 30).  Which is entirely unacceptable. 

Time to get out running again and see if I can pass a few of these folks.

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

To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

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

Runners' high

I am deeply ambivalent about running.

On the one hand, while I'm doing it, every fiber of my being is begging me to stop.  I'm short of breath, sweating, my legs ache.  It seems like I'll never be done, that this misery will go on forever.  My brain shouts at me with every step, demanding that I stop, asking me why the hell I'm doing this in the first place.  Voluntarily.  Without even a lion chasing me, or something, some circumstance that would make this reasonable behavior.

Me before the start of a race, experiencing deep ambivalence

However, a part of me craves it.  When I'm driving somewhere and I pass a guy out running, I immediately think, "I wish I was doing that right now."  I always feel better afterwards -- with the possible exception of the Montezuma 5K two years ago, when it was a good 95 F, and about 587% relative humidity.  But even then, when I got home -- and immediately went into my back yard, stripped, and jumped into my pond -- I had to admit I was glad I did it.

And crossing the finish line is itself a huge endorphin rush.  I'm a mediocre runner at best and will never be in contention for the top three slots, or even the top fifty, but when I finish -- usually in the middle of the pack -- I feel like a million bucks.  All the pain and misery are forgotten.  In fact, I have sometimes gone home from races, gotten online, and signed up for several more.

Crossing the finish line at the Fox Trot Trail Race, feeling far less ambivalent

The best part, though, is the racing community.  It's about as far from a cutthroat competition as you can get.  I'd guess the first four or five to cross are probably pushing to get ahead, but everyone else?  I can say that people at races are some of the friendliest folks around.  They honestly want everyone to do his/her best.  I've had people slow down, even turn around, when I'm lagging behind, and ask me if I was okay.  I've done the same for other runners.  The folks who have already finished cheer on the ones who follow them, urging them on to put on a final burst of speed as they approach the finish line, to "finish strong."  Afterwards, the question is never "what was your time?" or "what place did you finish in?", it's "did you have a good race?"

Most memorable was last year's Ithaca Twilight Race -- run on the solstice, when it's still light at nine PM.  It was a muggy evening, and after I finished, I got a bottle of water, plunked down onto the grass, and pulled my sweaty t-shirt off.  Shortly afterwards, a cute kid, maybe ten years old, came up to me with a big grin on his face, and gave me a double high-five.

He said, "Well done, Shirtless Tattoo Guy!"

Turns out I'm not alone in feeling this way.  New research in The Journal of Positive Psychology, just released last week and authored by Marzena Cypryańska and John Nezlek, looked at the attitudes of 404 recreational runners, and found something interesting -- but hardly surprising given my experience.  Not only were runners happier following a race, the high lasted throughout the following week.  They scored higher on just about every measure of well-being, including experiencing more positive emotions, having higher self-esteem and confidence, feeling more satisfied with life, and that their life had more meaning.

What's interesting is that the length of the race -- they looked at 5Ks all the way up to full marathons -- didn't matter.  Neither did what position the runner finished in.  The mere act of participating in a competitive run with a group of supportive people gave test subjects a boost that was remarkably long-lasting.

One thing that did seem to matter was how runners themselves felt about their performance.  If someone thought (s)he had "run well," the boost was significantly higher than if (s)he "didn't have a good race."  Again, it didn't matter where in the standings runners fell; a runner could come in 750th out of 1000, and if she felt like she'd run her best and was satisfied with the outcome, it was just as much of an endorphin rush as the woman who placed in the top fifty -- and a great deal more than the guy who came in #10 but felt like he hadn't done as well as he wanted.

I can vouch for this, too.  Last year, I ran the Trumansburg May Day 5K, and wasn't happy with my performance -- my time was high, my energy level low, and I ended up feeling kind of crummy.  I didn't do terribly -- I beat my time in the aforementioned Montezuma Sauna Race by a good three minutes -- but I just felt as if I hadn't met the standard I was shooting for.

And that cast a bit of gloom over running in general for quite some time afterward.

So the Cypryańska and Nezlek research shows a number of things -- it's important to participate in groups, critical to support each other, and perhaps most of all, necessary to be proud, not disparaging, of your own accomplishment.  After all, wherever you finished, you're still ahead of the people who are sitting on the sidelines.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me.  I've got some races to sign up for.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is one of personal significance to me -- Michael Pollan's latest book, How to Change Your Mind.  Pollan's phenomenal writing in tours de force like The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire shines through here, where he takes on a controversial topic -- the use of psychedelic drugs to treat depression and anxiety.

Hallucinogens like DMT, LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin have long been classified as schedule-1 drugs -- chemicals which are off limits even for research except by a rigorous and time-consuming approval process that seldom results in a thumbs-up.  As a result, most researchers in mood disorders haven't even considered them, looking instead at more conventional antidepressants and anxiolytics.  It's only recently that there's been renewed interest, when it was found that one administration of drugs like ketamine, under controlled conditions, was enough to alleviate intractable depression, not just for hours or days but for months.

Pollan looks at the subject from all angles -- the history of psychedelics and why they've been taboo for so long, the psychopharmacology of the substances themselves, and the people whose lives have been changed by them.  It's a fascinating read -- and I hope it generates a sea change in our attitudes toward chemicals that could help literally millions of people deal with disorders that can rob their lives of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Racing against your brain

Being a devoted (if not especially fast) runner, and also ridiculously competitive, I'm always interested in ways to increase my speed and endurance.

It's not, honestly, that I am under any illusion of my becoming a world-class marathoner, or anything.  I'm 58 years old, and don't think there's any way I'd ever have the determination to train intensely enough to be a contender for first place.  But I'd like to see some improvement -- specifically, more improvement than I've seen over the past two years, when I've been stuck averaging around a ten-minute mile while younger and more athletic guys are clocking in with seven-minute miles or better.

Yesterday I found out that some of my problem is probably in my brain, not in my legs.

A study published last week in Nature: Human Behavior called, "Learning One's Genetic Risk Changes Physiology Independent of Actual Genetic Risk," by psychologists Bradley P. Turnwald, J. Parker Goyer, Danielle Z. Boles, Amy Silder, Scott L. Delp, and Alia J. Crum of Stanford University, suggests something astonishing; your performance in a race is more dependent on whether you think you have a variant of a gene that improves stamina than whether you actually have the gene.

The setup was simple.  They tested volunteers to determine which variant of a (real) gene called CREB-1 they had.  One version tends to increase endurance, and the other reduces it, so which variant you have determines how easily you tire.  They then split the entire group four ways; (1) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they do; (2) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they have the low-endurance variant; (3) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they do; and (4) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they have the high-endurance variant.

The results were unequivocal.  Those who were told they had the low-endurance variant of CREB-1 processed out carbon dioxide less efficiently, tired more quickly, ran more slowly, and gave up sooner than the ones who were told they had the high-endurance variant -- regardless of which variant they had.

Me at the end of a race in Montezuma, New York last year.  It was 95 F and about eight krillion percent humidity, and I definitely was not thinking, "I have excellent endurance and stamina."  My mindset was more, "I hope I can make it across the finish line before I die so at least I won't block the trail for the other runners."

The most amazing thing to me is the carbon dioxide part.  The rest of it I can attribute to attitude -- if I think I'm going to crap out more quickly because of some factor beyond my control, I'm likely to interpret all the stuff runners have to put up with -- the little aches and pains, shortness of breath, sweating, and heart pounding -- as evidence that I'm not going to be competitive no matter what I do.  It's easy to see someone paying unwarranted attention to what happens to all of us when we run, and giving up more quickly, if they figure that it's just their unfortunate genetic makeup causing it.

But the carbon dioxide part is fascinating, because that's not something under any sort of voluntary control.  It's hard to see how you could affect the rate at which carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by some kind of power-of-positive-thinking phenomenon.  But that seems to be what happened.  "What people haven’t fully appreciated is that that information also puts you into a mindset: 'I’m at high risk or I'm protected,'" study co-author Alia Crum said.  "And that alone can have potent effects on physiology and motivation."

Of course, what I want to know is how.  How could simply thinking that you have good endurance change your physiology drastically enough to result in a measurable increase in speed and stamina?

And more to the point, how can I tap into that?

I've always been pretty dubious about the results of positive self-talk.  I mean, it's probably better than negative self-talk, but I've always thought it was only from the standpoint of making you a generally happier person.  (Not that this is inconsequential, mind you.)  But apparently athleticism has as much to do with mindset as it does with genes, and when elite athletes say that the only way to succeed is to believe you can, there might be something scientific to it after all.

But for me, it falls into the "Now that I know this, what do I do?" department.  I suppose I could try convincing myself that I'm fast and powerful and all the rest, but I have this sneaking suspicion my brain would be saying at the same time, "C'mon, you know that's not true," which would probably spoil the effect.  Or maybe I could have a genetic test for CREB-1 and have my wife lie to me about the results if it turns out I have the low-endurance variant.

Whatever I do, it's probably more important simply to keep training.  But maybe cursing myself when those young bucks zoom past me isn't the best approach -- maybe I should be thinking, "Next time, that'll be me."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

A winning smile

I've been told I have "resting scowl face."  I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking down the hall in the school and a student has said, "Boy, you look pissed off," or at the very least, "He's on a mission."

It gets worse when I'm concentrating.  My wife has told me that when I'm performing with my band, I have a knitted brow and that my eyes look... "intense."

She always tries to phrase things kindly if she can.

The odd thing is that I honestly enjoy performing, so it's not that I'm having a bad time.  I have a hard time explaining why I do scowl so much of the time, because I'm really not an angry person.

Really.

On the other hand, I just realized I was scowling when I wrote that.

The reason all this comes up is some recent research into the connection between facial expressions and endurance while running. Noah E. Brick, Megan J. McElhinney, and Richard S. Metcalfe, in a paper called "The Effects of Facial Expression and Relaxation Cues on Movement Economy, Physiological, and Perceptual Responses During Running" that appeared in the Journal of the Psychology of Sport and Exercise last month, found that deliberately relaxing your facial muscles and smiling while on a run actually helps you to move with more economy, resulting in less discomfort and an overall improvement in performance.

As a runner, I found this fascinating.  I'm sure, given that I scowl a large percent of the time anyway, that I must look positively furious while I'm running.  I don't have much photographic evidence of that, however, because there's a natural tendency to mug for the camera when you pass a race photographer.  But I honestly can't imagine the smile lasting for much more than a second or two after the shutter clicks.

What is coolest about this is that the researchers didn't just ask runners for their perceptions before and after, they had them breathe through a mask that measured their oxygen uptake (a good measure of the efficiency of your muscles).  They had four groups -- one that maintained a neutral expression, one as genuine a smile as you can muster under those conditions, one that was instructed to scowl, and one that concentrated on relaxing their entire upper body.  (The last-mentioned group was instructed to pretend that "they were holding a crisp with both hands while they were running and trying not to break it.")

Okay, so maybe I don't scowl the whole time.

The results were astonishing.  The smiling group was 2.8% more efficient than the scowling group, and 2.2% better than the neutral group.  (The relaxed group fell in between the two.)  While this may not seem like much of an improvement, it's equivalent to six weeks of consistent jump training (plyometrics).  And, I might add, it's a hell of a lot more pleasant.  The authors write:

The improved RE [respiratory efficiency] is toward the lower end of the 2%–8% reported for short-term training modes (e.g., Moore, 2016) but is greater than the smallest worthwhile change for RE (2.2%–2.6%) suggested by Saunders, Pyne, Telford, and Hawley (2004).  As such, the improved RE can be considered a real and worthwhile change.  Furthermore, the lower VO2 when smiling is equivalent to the 2%–3% improvement noted by Turner, Owings, and Schwane (2003) following six-weeks of plyometric training in distance runners, and the 1.7%–2.1% observed by Barnes et al. (2013) after 13 weeks of heavy resistance training in male cross-country runners.

So I'm gonna try it.  My first race isn't for a couple of months, given that we're still in the third of the seasons in upstate New York's "four-season climate" (the four seasons are: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction) and the roadsides are covered with a nice layer of dirty slush.  But I can always try it while I'm training on the treadmill at the gym, although it might make my gym buddy wonder what's wrong with me.

What I find most fascinating about this is to speculate about the cause.  You have to wonder if it's because our expressions are so tied to our emotions -- that perhaps wearing a scowl puts your body on alert for danger, resulting in a combination of discomfort and an increase in adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol (which would boost the rate at which you burn fuel without necessarily giving you anything back in the form of speed or endurance).  That's all just guesswork, however.

In any case, it's worth a shot.  So if you see a skinny blond guy running down the road in upstate New York wearing a goofy grin, I'm not high, I'm just running an experiment.  Literally.

Run for your life

Back when I was in my thirties, I got into running in a big way.

I used to do four to five miles a day, pretty much no matter what the weather, all the more impressive because I live in upstate New York, where warm weather is in woefully short supply (this year, summer is scheduled for the second Thursday in July).  But unless we were knee-deep in snow, I was out there.

Then, in my forties, I began to develop some joint problems, which were (and still are) of unknown origin, and those only resolved a couple of years ago.  So I'm back at it, and in fact have my first semi-comptetitive 5K of 2017 three weeks from now.

What's funny is that while I'm running, mostly what I'm thinking about is, "merciful heavens, why do I do this to myself?"  My quads and calves ache, I'm breathing hard, all I want is to see that blessed sight of the Finish Line.  But afterwards... all I can say is that the feeling is euphoric.  Despite being tired and sweaty and having spaghetti legs, my general feeling is "Woo hoo!  Gotta do that again soon!"

So what's going on here?  Am I some kind of masochist who gets his jollies out of being miserable?  Or am I like the guy who pounds his head on the wall because it feels so good when he stops?

If so, I'm not alone -- and neuroscientists have just taken the first steps toward figuring out why.

Me with a medal and some serious post-race euphoria

Apparently, part of what's going on is that vigorous aerobic exercise stimulates the growth of neurons in the brain.  It was long the conventional wisdom that humans couldn't do that; you had a certain number of neurons at adulthood, and afterwards the number would only go one way.  You could only affect the rate at which the neurons declined, based on such things as alcohol and drug use, concussions, and the number of times you listen to Ken Ham trying to defend why Noah's Ark is actually real science.

But according to Karen Postal, president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology, that may not be true -- and one thing that affects not only preserving the gray matter you have, but increasing it, is exercise.  "If you are exercising so that you sweat — about 30 to 40 minutes — new brain cells are being born," said Postal, who is a runner herself.  "And it just happens to be in that memory area...  That's it.  That's the only trigger that we know about."

Other researchers have gone one step further than that.  Emily E. Bernstein and Richard J. McNally of Harvard University recently published a study called "Acute Aerobic Exercise Helps Overcome Emotion Regulation Deficits," which shows that our ability to modulate our negative emotions -- especially grief, helplessness, and anxiety -- can be improved dramatically by the simply expedient of going for a half-hour's run.  The authors write:

Although colloquial wisdom and some studies suggest an association between regular aerobic exercise and emotional well-being, the nature of this link remains poorly understood.  We hypothesised that aerobic exercise may change the way people respond to their emotions.  Specifically, we tested whether individuals experiencing difficulties with emotion regulation would benefit from a previous session of exercise and show swifter recovery than their counterparts who did not exercise.  Participants completed measures of emotion response tendencies, mood, and anxiety, and were randomly assigned to either stretch or jog for 30 minutes.  All participants then underwent the same negative and positive mood inductions, and reported their emotional responses... Interactions revealed that aerobic exercise attenuated [negative] effects.  Moderate aerobic exercise may help attenuate negative emotions for participants initially experiencing regulatory difficulties.  

This is no surprise to me, nor, I suspect, to anyone else who runs.  The process creates space in your mind, space that can then act as a springboard to creativity.  It's like one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, says in his paean to the sport, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: "I just run.  I run in void.  Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void."

Or as Melissa Dahl said in her piece in The Science of Us called "Why Running Helps to Clear Your Mind," "[T]here’s another big mental benefit to gain from running, one that scientists haven’t quiet yet managed to pin down to poke at and study: the wonderful way your mind drifts here and there as the miles go by.  Mindfulness, or being here now, is a wonderful thing, and there is a seemingly ever-growing stack of scientific evidence showing the good it can bring to your life.  And yet mindlessness — daydreaming, or getting lost in your own weird thoughts — is important, too."

Which is it exactly.  And with that, I think I'll wind up here.  Maybe go for a run.  And after that, who knows what I'll do with all those extra neurons?

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many 5Ks, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology that suggests my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like  "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent. They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt... They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my run times lately, and in fact just set a personal record for a 5K two weeks ago -- 29:57 (which may not seem all that great to any competitive runners out there, but considering that I'm 56 and until this year hadn't run at all for ten years, I'm pretty damn pleased with it).

I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, however, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

Thoughts on a drive-by

Note to the guy who roared past me this afternoon as I was out on a run, yelled, "Faggot!  Put a shirt on!", and threw a half-full can of soda at my head:

First, about the epithet.  That's a word that has been hurled at me many times before, starting with the cretins in the locker room in eighth grade, despite their having no information whatsoever about my sexual orientation.  Not that they cared, I suspect.  The mere fact of my being tall and thin, and caring more about playing music and writing stories than I did about football, made me suspect in their eyes.  I was called that, and equivalent words, with clock-like regularity throughout high school and even into college, by people who evidently thought their mission was to make others' lives as powerless and miserable as possible.

I didn't defend myself against the claim then, and I'm not going to do it now.  Back in my public school days, arguing the point would have simply brought more negative attention my way, not to mention being futile.  Now, however, my reasoning is different.  If the gentleman in the jacked-up pickup truck had stopped to discuss the matter with me, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Why does my sexual orientation make a difference to you?"  I'm not going to defend myself against an accusation that isn't shameful either way.  I'm publicly out as bisexual, but if you want to call me gay, have at it.

Second, I run shirtless when the weather's warm because I like to.  Why that is a problem I have no idea.  One of the simple pleasures of our short summer here in upstate New York is the feel of the sun and wind on my skin, and I'll be damned if I'll forgo that because you think I'm too old, too skinny, or too whatever.  At 55, I finally have reached a point where I'm not ashamed of the body I was gifted by my genetics, and I'm not going to let the snarling of a neanderthal whose IQ matches his hat size shove me back down into self-loathing.  Spent too long there already, and never intend to go back, thanks.

Somehow, I think Mr. Rogers would be on my side in this matter.

The upshot of it all is actually kind of empowering; the startling discovery that you, and people like you, can't hurt me any more.  I have no need of your approval.  I don't care if you think I'm ugly, skinny, gay, or all of the above.  I wish I'd realized all this forty years ago, but we all move at our own pace.

And in the end, all you did is to put a damper on a single afternoon's run.  Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up and I'll be fine.  I'm still going to run, still going to shed the shirt when I feel like it, and still enjoy being outdoors in the sunshine.

You, on the other hand, will wake up tomorrow morning, and still be an asshole.  So on the whole, I believe this means that you lose.

So would David Bowie.

Oh, and finally: your aim sucks.  You missed me with the soda can by about fifteen feet.  I picked up the can, and I'm going to return it to the redemption center and get your five cents' deposit.  Have a nice day.