Tonle Sap (Part Two)

This is the second installment from my reporting trip to Cambodia's Lake Tonle Sap. Part One featured two audio slideshows about the project. The slideshows and the stories posted originally appeared online at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which funded my trip.


Click the link below to read about water's role in the rise, fall, and renewal of Angkor Wat.
Cambodia: Lessons from the Past | Pulitzer Center

Click the link below to read a short profile of one Tonle Sap fisherman.
Cambodia: Uncertain Future for Fishermen | Pulitzer Center

For all the entries, visit the project page at the Pulitzer Center's site. 

Tonle Sap (Part One)

In late January and early February 2014, I traveled to Cambodia for two and a half weeks, thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. My reporting partner was video journalist and recent Pulitzer Center hire, Steve Sapienza. Together, we followed scientists and fishermen working on Cambodia's great lake, the Tonle Sap. Steve and I have several pieces coming out in June and July based on this reporting--in the New York Times (scheduled June 10), on PBS Newshour (about a week later, stay tuned), and in the Virginia Quarterly Review (summer issue, out July 1).  Fair warning: they all cover the same story in different ways. Here are two audio slideshows originally posted on our project page within the Pulitzer Center's website.

In Part Two, I will post a story about water's critical role in the rise, fall, and renewal of Angkor Wat, and a short profile of a Tonle Sap fisherman.

The Smell Summit (cinnamon buns, jelly beans, and death)

Today, the world's top odor scientists are gathering in Huntington Beach, California (Orange County) for the 35th annual meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences. When odor researchers get together, they often talk about flavor, and so it is no surprise that the conference is sponsored by Pepsico, which owns Pepsi, Frito Lay, Tropicana, Quaker, and Gatorade. The other top sponsor is probably less well known, except among food scientists -- Givaudan, the Swiss flavor and fragrance concocters, in whose labs the hundreds of chemical odor compounds that mingle in every flavor are dissected, analyzed, and recombined intro wondrous new combinations (like a picanha*-flavored potato chip).

In chapter four of Mind Over Mind, "Accounting for Taste," I write about how the odor of food and drink wraps our sense of taste and our taste preferences in layers of expectations and emotional associations. Much of the research to be presented at the smell-science meeting speaks to effects of different smells on the brain and the impacts of cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer's and autism,  on smell and taste. One panel discussion focuses on how different tastes signal the production of gut peptides that regulate how hungry we feel and how much we subsequently eat. And then there are the more esoteric topics, which I share here for your reading pleasure:

"The Effects of Aroma of Baked Cinnamon Bun on Stability"; "Tests of Retronasal Smell in Children: Which Flavored Jelly Bean Works Best?"; "Temperature of Served Water Can Influence Sensory Perception and Acceptance of Subsequent Food."

And my favorite, due to its creepiness: "Three-Minute Smell Test Predicts Risk of Death" in which University of Chicago researchers measured the sense of smell of about 3,000 older people and then followed up with them for five years. Independent of major mortality risk factors such as smoking or disease, the people with a poor sense of smell were three times more likely to be dead in five years than those with a normal sense of smell. Sniff.

*picanha is a Brazilian term for a fatty, salty morsel of grilled beef 

Wait!

Today's topic is delay.....

Two recent studies from the journal Psychological Science offer surprising insights into when and why our brains say, "not so fast."

The first one, from researchers at USC's Marshall School of Business, suggests that power makes people more willing to say no to a cash offered right now, if it means they can get more money later. The behavior under study is called "temporal discounting" -- the tendency for people to prefer a smaller reward to a larger one, if that means they get it now instead of waiting (beyond the point where inflation, etc would wash out any difference in real value) -- we shortchange our future selves. In four experiments, these researchers showed that giving people a temporary boost in power (making them the "boss" in a group activity) made them more willing to wait for more money.

Crazy, right? Doesn't power override inhibitions and whet one's appetite for risk? Yes, say the study's authors, but it also seems to increase people's affinity with their future selves. For one thing, they write, "Power engenders a sense of control and optimism, reducing the uncertainty associated with the future [which is] one of the causes of temporal discounting." Indeed, the effect of power on reward choice was mediated by how close people reported feeling to their future selves in a questionnaire. In a survey study done outside the lab, people who reported feeling more powerful in their daily lives also reported saving a lot more for retirement, even controlling for factors such as income. age, and education.

The second study, by a group of British researchers, finds a mind-body link in inhibitions. When offered a series of gambles, people were more risk averse when they were occasionally prompted to stop making a simple movement that was otherwise part of the experiment (i.e. pressing the spacebar after choosing their wager). It wasn't that people who stopped their thumbs from hitting the space bar stopped gambling altogether. "Occasional motor inhibition reduced monetary risk taking by approximately 10% to 15%," the researchers note. But, the results suggest a general inhibition system in the brain, and, more generally, that inhibition can be enhanced with practice.

Did He Need to Cheat?

Lance Armstrong has finally admitted that he cheated his way to seven Tour de France titles. The confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey (part one last night and part two tonight) is big news, even if it's not exactly shocking.

     Mostly, it's sad, of course. Sad that the sport of cycling has lost its biggest icon and its last "real" champion. Sad for the many people Armstrong lied to and lied about to protect his name. Sad for the overall message of inspiration he seemed to embody. And I'll add one more sad note: There are serious doubts now being raised about whether the effectiveness of all that Erythropoietin (EPO) that Armstrong and his fellow top-tier cyclists pumped into their blood.

     To be clear, EPO (a hormone that enhances the body's production of red blood cells) is not the only thing Armstrong injected to boost his performance. Other banned substances he admitted using include human growth hormone and testosterone. But EPO has become the illicit drug of choice for endurance athletes looking for an edge. That's because it is believed to increase the blood's ability to carry oxygen and thereby increase the athlete's aerobic power. Indeed, one recent review found that EPO boosts the maximum oxygen uptake by 6 to 9 percent.

     But does EPO really boost athletic performance? Not according to a 2012 meta-analysis of EPO studies published by the British Medical Journal, which found "no scientific basis to conclude [EPO] has performance enhancing properties in elite cyclists." For one thing, the study's authors pointed out that there are other measures that may be even more important to elite athletic perform, such as "lactate threshold" (the point when lactate production increases faster than it can be cleared by the body), that EPO has not been shown to improve. Plus, the hormone is also known to thicken the blood, making the heart work harder (this increase of blood viscosity also increases the risk of blood clots, heart attacks and strokes), which might work against endurance.

     Armstrong's reputation is in ruins. He's been stripped of his titles, banned from the sport to which he devoted his life, and shunned by the cancer charity Livestrong that he founded. All because he (and so many of his competitors) felt the need to cheat. Topping off this shame pile is the possibility that he and many others might have raced just as fast without EPO.

   

Thanks! That Was a Blast!

In a few days, I'll be pestering everybody about a forthcoming OpEd I wrote about New Year's resolutions and placebo willpower. First, I want to take a moment to step outside of this blog's theme and look back rather than forward.

In the fall of 2010, this book was, appropriately enough, nothing but expectations. If you're reading this blog, chances are good that at some point in the last two years, I talked your ear off about what the book could be, or what it seemed to be becoming, or where it had ended up, for better or worse. Thanks for asking, listening, offering support, and giving me feedback. All of it mattered and helped shape the book. Most of all, thanks for reading!

Now, the book is done. A friend and fellow book author described the days before publication day as, "the calm before the calm." So it has been. But it's been thrilling nonetheless. With a new year right around the corner, it's time to move on to new challenges. In 2013, this blog will still pay attention to expectations news and research, of course, but it may also start to move in a few different directions, too. Any and all ideas welcome!

Happy Holidays! I wish you a joyful new year!

Placebos and Evolution: A Theory

A few weeks ago, Nicholas Humphrey, the renowned British psychologist, emailed me with some of his thoughts on placebos and self healing.

Humphrey is one of the few researchers who dare to go beyond the IF and the HOW questions of placebo healing and delve into the WHY. Specifically, if humans are endowed with varied and powerful self-healing resources, why are these effects so conditional and reliable for some while nonexistent for others, and why do we seem to need "permission" from some third party (be it a pill, a doctor, or a sign from the heavens) to trigger our endogenous healing potential?

Over the years, Humphrey has put together a theory about all this -- an evolutionary tale, a story of ancient, cognitive reflexes, protective and essential in our cave days but overly-cautious in the modern world, coaxed with a bit of trickery. Along with the neurologist and evolutionary psychologist John Skoyles, Humphrey wrote a concise version of this theory in the September 2012 issue of Current Biology titled, "The Evolutionary Psychology of Healing: A Human Success Story."

It's a fascinating theory that Humphrey also describes in a podcast interview (his bit starts at 15:14). Before I offer my layman's summary, it's worth noting that Humphrey's family tree includes both the economist John Maynard Keynes and, most pertinent for this post, the physiologist A.V. Hill. It was Hill who first postulated the idea that there must be some kind of protective mechanism a "governor" either incorporated in the heart muscle or in the brain that could regulating fatigue in an exercising body to prevent us from exerting ourselves to death. The idea was largely ignored until the 1990s when the South African exercise physiologist Tim Noakes picked up and expanded on the concept, and began giving this "central governor" more empirical support. Accordingly, the central governor protects us by inducing fatigue, slowing us down, conserving our resources, based on an ongoing, forward-looking analysis of how much gas we have left in the tank and how much farther it is to the finish line.

Humphrey first points out that the benefits of our self-healing mechanisms (our immune systems, our natural wound healing, even our protective pain and our toxin-killing fevers) also have costs in terms of consuming energy and nutrients, and the opportunity costs of a day in bed. He proposes that in our cave days, these costs could loom very large indeed, and that a self-healing "governor" would take them into account and possibly hold the self-healing mechanisms back until the coast was clear, the days were warmer, and resources such as food were easier to come by.

The self-healing governor, though hardwired, could learn things, Humphrey says. It could learn about medicine, for instance, and become more generous and optimistic with healing resources under its spell, both the "directly curative" treatments and the "mumbo-jumbo" of rituals and snake oil. Nevertheless, the governor remained essentially conservative, stuck in evolutionary time, unaware that (at least in the developed world) we lived in a context of abundant resources where day-to-day survival was much less of an iffy proposition.

Enter the placebo -- a bit of a ruse that might have been catastrophic in our hardscrabble history but today is what Humphreys and Skoyles dub, "a dose of contrived optimism" that fits the reality of our world and can, "restore confidence in the wisdom of self-cure."