Time Flies When You're Having Fun/Fear/Fever

Last year I shared how the amount that time flies can make it seem like we are having more fun. Maybe that's because the things that make us happy are usually the things that speed up our internal clock:

Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here's where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you're feeling sleepy. But it might last 100 pulses if you've just drunk an espresso.

So if you're having a good time, just sit back relax (slow your heartbeat) and enjoy it. However, a faster internal clock can also make it seem like time slowed down. In an experiment neuroscientist David Eagleman dropped participants from a SCAD free fall tower. Each person was asked to look at a chronometer when they fell and when they landed and then afterward use a stopwatch to go back over the fall and estimate the feeling of length. Here are the results and explanation:

Eagleman’s subjects overestimate the length of their fall by thirty-six per cent. To his surprise, though, the speed of their perception doesn’t change as they drop: no matter how hard they stare at the chronometer, they can’t read the numbers. “In some sense, that’s more interesting than what we thought was going on,” Eagleman told me. “It suggests that time and memory are so tightly intertwined that they may be impossible to tease apart.”

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

When your internal clock speeds up, but you are still taking in the same amount of information, sometimes it can actually feel like time slowed down. A pretty good argument to have new experiences later in life (to slow time down). Interestingly enough, being sick can have a similar outcome:

Eagleman traces his research back to psychophysicists in Germany in the late eighteen-hundreds, but his true forefather may be the American physiologist Hudson Hoagland. In the early nineteen-thirties, Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps time, based partly on his wife’s behavior when she had the flu. She complained that he’d been away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when he’d been gone only a short while. So Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with his watch. It’s not hard to imagine her annoyance at this suggestion, or his smugness afterward: when her minute was up, his clock showed thirty-seven seconds. Hoagland went on to repeat the experiment again and again, presumably over his wife’s delirious objections (her fever rose above a hundred and three). The result was one of the classic graphs of time-perception literature: the higher his wife’s temperature, Hoagland found, the shorter her time estimate. Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got.

Yesterday I tried to figure out whether we should let people know the length of time allotted for good and bad tasks. I think it might depend on what that task does to our internal clock.

Economics of Weight Gain

From research on American teenagers:

I found statistically significant estimates, indicating that females gain weight in weaker economic periods and males gain weight in stronger economic periods.

Perhaps male wieght gain is something to be earned and female weight gain is a stress response. Anyone got any other possible explanations?

The Black Plague and Nazi Holocaust

When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

Via The Browser.

Follow Your Heartbeat

I've come across a few articles recently all on how our heartbeat influences us. Here's a snippet from an interesting paper related to my previous post on our unconscious thoughts. In the study students were asked to figure out a game with no obvious strategy:

Most players gradually found a way to win at the card game and they reported having relied on intuition rather than reason. Subtle changes in the players' heart rates and sweat responses affected how quickly they learned to make the best choices during the game.

Interestingly, the quality of the advice that people's bodies gave them varied. Some people's gut feelings were spot on, meaning they mastered the card game quickly. Other people's bodies told them exactly the wrong moves to make, so they learned slowly or never found a way to win.

Dunn and his co-authors found this link between gut feelings and intuitive decision making to be stronger in people who were more aware of their own heartbeat. So for some individuals being able to 'listen to their heart' helped them make wise choices, whereas for others it led to costly mistakes.

So being aware of your heartbeat makes your "heart" and your "head" more connected. Similar to this and connected to my recent post on empathy, being aware of others' feelings can change our heartbeat. In the study some of the participants were forced to bond and some weren't. Then:

the other student was allocated the task of running on the spot vigorously for three minutes. This time, the sight of their partner running apparently caused the socially connected participants to experience increased heart rate and blood pressure, as compared with the participants who hadn't been prompted to feel socially connected. A weak bond had led the strangers' hearts to beat together.

So being socially connected makes you feel what they feel. So being aware of your heartbeat can help you access your subconscious, be more empathetic, and in this last study, improve your internal clock:

Thirty-one participants listened to auditory tones of either 8, 14, or 20 seconds duration. After each one, they heard a second tone and had to press a button when they thought its duration matched the first. Counting was forbidden during the task and a secondary, number-based memory task helped enforce this rule. Heart-beat perception accuracy was measured separately and simply involved participants counting silently their own heart-beats over periods of 25, 35, 45 and 60 seconds.

The take away message is that the participants who were more in tune with their heart-beats also tended to perform better at the time estimation task.

Perhaps these are some of the benefits of silent meditation and prayer.

Learning by Teaching: The 1918 Spanish Flu

In light of the events in Japan, this may be the most under-learned natural disaster in history:

The pandemic lasted from June 1917 to December 1920, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (1.8 billion at the time), died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 28% (≈1/4) were infected.

Compare that to the 9 million that died in WWI, the largest war in Western history at that time.

Negative Spillovers of Addiction

From Charlie Sheen's father, Martin Sheen:

"Because when you're addicted, you don't grow emotionally. So. when you get clean and sober you're starting at the moment you started using drugs or alcohol," the actor tells the UK's Telegraph magazine. "You're emotionally crippled."

Important for any of us who put a lot of focus on any one of our flaws.

Not Breaking News: Japanese Nuclear Incident

As I'm sure you've heard, Japan has just been through the second largest earthquake in the last 50 years. That and the resulting tsunami has left approximately 8,000 dead and 13,000 missing. But if you go to that link, which was the first Google result of "japan earthquake tsunami dead", you'll notice most of the information is not about the duel natural disaster responsible for this tragedy, but instead focuses on the ongoing nuclear power plant problems (this chart puts the radiation in perspective). Although that issue is important, it is getting too much coverage.

The numbers are close to impossible to find online, but unless I'm missing something no one has been killed or injured by the nuclear incident. In fact, if anyone has been killed by a energy explosion it's probably at the Chiba japanese oil refinery explosion. By my calculations, if you don't count the now defunct Soviet Bloc, there have been less than 150 deaths from nuclear power in it's almost 100 year history (compare that to coal's recent history). Despite this, Germany has temporarily shut down older nuclear power plants and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing our own facilities.

It is worth noting that this is a big deal. Japan is the only country to have nuclear weapons dropped on it's cities and the nuclear plant will likely be a wasteland. But that doesn't mean this news trumps the real destruction that could be as big as 8% of Japan's total GDP. It's the future of Japan's political and economic system that will fill the news in the next couple of months, hopefully not some nuclear problem where no one gets killed or even injured. It's important to remember the Fukushima Daiichi facility in Japan is 40 years old. It's nothing compared to the new nuclear power plants.

My hope is that history will look back on this tragedy and remember just how safe nuclear power actually is. A nuclear power plant built in 1971 survived a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 10 meter high waves. I recently watched an interview of Jon Stewart by Rachel Maddow. It's long, but worth watching. In it they discuss the idea that when there is 24 hours of news coverage, everything is made to sound like breaking news. It isn't. The earthquake was 39,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Now that's news.

If You're Reading This, You're (Comparatively) Fine

I talk regularly about how rich we are. Here's why:

"Generally if people compare themselves to those who are worse off, they're going to feel better," continues Bauer, now a research associate at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and a clinical psychologist at Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Associates of Toronto. "When they compare themselves to people who are better off, it can make them feel worse."

Looking towards others who are worse off can also have a marked effect on physical health: Participants who used downward social comparisons reported experiencing fewer cold symptoms. Overall, they reported a positive effect on their emotional well-being over the months that followed.

Is this way of dealing with challenges a healthy understanding of history or a dangerous coping mechanism?

Giving Life from Death Row

Written by a death row inmate:

There is no way to atone for my crimes, but I believe that a profound benefit to society can come from my circumstances. I have asked to end my remaining appeals, and then donate my organs after my execution to those who need them. But my request has been rejected by the prison authorities.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, there are more than 110,000 Americans on organ waiting lists. Around 19 of them die each day. There are more than 3,000 prisoners on death row in the United States, and just one inmate could save up to eight lives by donating a healthy heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and other transplantable tissues.

Or we could just print organs.

The Reverse Placebo

If education and ignorance can be positive placebos, can the reverse be true?:

Researchers from Britain and Germany used brain scans to map how a person's feelings and past experiences can influence the effectiveness of medicines, and found that a powerful painkilling drug with a true biological effect can appear not to be working if a patient has been primed to expect it to fail.

Via Justin Landwehr.

Why Most Political Assassinations Happen

I'm coming around to the idea of President as Comforter-in-Chief in times of terrible violence. But that doesn't explain why these man-made tragedies happen. There has been a lot of speculation on the reasons for the recent shooting in Tucson. Whether it's guns and mental health or the problems with media and politicians, none ring true or have much factual support. That is until a recent NPR story pointed to a study done in 1999 by the Secret Service. Here's how they got their information:

In the Secret Service Exception Case Study Project, they identified 83 people who had completed assassinations or made assassination attempts since 1949 — some cases known to the public, some not — and collected every document they could find. Fein and Vossekuil also went to visit many of these people in jail.

Seems direct enough. Here's what they concluded:

"It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric," Fein says.

What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, many of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives, which, the paper argues, was the true motive. They didn't want to see themselves as nonentities.

"They experienced failure after failure after failure, and decided that rather than being a 'nobody,' they wanted to be a 'somebody,' " Fein says.

And here's the craziest part, they aren't crazy:

"There's nothing crazy about thinking that if I attacked the president or a major public official, I would get a lot of attention. I would get a lot of attention. My goal was notoriety," Fein says. "That's why I bought the weapon."

And most of the assassins and would-be assassins weren't totally disorganized by mental illness, either.

"They were quite organized," Fein says. "Because one has to be organized — at least to some extent — to attack a public official."

So why not just kill any celebrity?

And one thing Borum and Fein say about choosing a political figure — as opposed to choosing a show-business celebrity — is that the would-be assassins are able to associate themselves with a broader political movement or goal. That allows them to see themselves as not such a bad person. In this way, Borum says, assassins are basically murderers in search of a cause.

I'm not sure if this is more or less comforting than what I previously thought.

Diversified New Year's Resolutions Redux

Last year I attempted five different New Year's Resolutions and pretty much failed on all of them. Even though knowing when to quit is important, I'm not yet convinced to give up. The main reason I've decided to give it another go is because my goals haven't really changed much. If I still think they are a good idea, then they must be. Just to remind you, here are the goals:

1) Moderate exercise for 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week. From what I have read this is the minimum time needed to remain nominally healthy. Hopefully I will work my way up from here, but it's good to start small.

2) Drink 0-1/2 soft drink daily in my home. Again, the plan is to work down to zero, but there's a good chance I'm addicted to caffeine.

3) Read the Bible every weekday. Not many exact parameters on this one yet, but I would like to open and read a portion of the Bible 5 days a week. I claim to believe it's valuable, but my actions say otherwise. (update)

4) Pray regularly. Same details as the previous one.

5) Allow my wife to pick one for me. She knows my flaws better than anyone and I trust her more than anyone. Who better to help me improve? (update)

The only difference is this year I'm going to put my economics skills to work. This year I'm going to try a very specific commitment device. I hope to put in place a future incentive to keep my future self just as motivated as my current self. Last year a reader recommended that I put money on the line using the website stickK.com. The only problem with that is my wife is cheaper than me, so she would be punished more for my failure. Not a recipe for a happy household. Instead, I've made her my commitment device. One of our big financial debates is whether I got out with friends after improv practices and shows. So here's what we've agreed to:

For each of the five goals completed, I will earn $1 to go out with friends every week.

It's not much, but maybe it will be that little nudge I need.

Emptying the Bottle: Early-January '11 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• RegretTheError.com posts corrections, retractions, and apologies in the press.
• Julian Assange is upset about the information leaked about his charges (earlier).
• In rich and fat countries, do overweight politicians have an advantage?
• With a lack of safe disposal, smoking bans actually increase fires.
• Popularity of internet activities in each generation [chart].
• Talking hands free in the car makes your forget to compensate for talking.
• Cigarette taxes cover spillover costs, but alcohol taxes do not.
• Interactive map of American English dialects.
• Sex after marriage rates higher in stability, satisfaction, and "sexual quality".
• Socially insecure men have a higher aggression towards immigrants (earlier).
• Employer provided health care may decrease unemployment (earlier).
• Prisoners' release dependent on future kidney donation (earlier).
• How the world has changed from 2000 to 2010 [graphic].

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Emptying the Bottle: Late-December '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• Interactive graphic of slavery in America (hat-tip to Justin W).
• Then and now photography with repeat pictures of changing landscapes [photos] (earlier).
• Coming soon to 2011, an internet-browser-only computer.
• Essays with more legible handwriting were evaluated more positively.
• Forget the gold standard, how about the classic giant stone disc standard [audio] (earlier).
• Divorce can make you sick and remarriage is the solution (earlier).
• Economists work harder at the beginning of their career when the benefits are larger.
• Penelope Trunk hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio [read the comments too].
• Send your parents a personalized tech support care package.
• How about just public catastrophic health insurance? I'm on board. (earlier).
• iPhone adds to our trade deficit with China and it doesn't matter (earlier).
• Hans Rosling's economics of the last 200 years chart is misleading (earlier).

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Emptying the Bottle: Mid-October '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• The merits of non-voting [video] (earlier).
• We are loyal to our dentist because he causes us pain.
• Why Britian is always a forerunner. Ease of legislation.
• Germany finally pays off World War I debt.
• Government pays citizens to watch CCTV footage to prevent crime.
• Having too many channels can make you less happy (earlier).
• US health care spending as a percentage of GDP [graphic].
• ICP are insane, clowns, a posse, and... Christians?
• In future Russia, cars drive you.
• Democrats and Republicans selfishly disagree on Citizens United v. FEC.
• Story about the 1965 NYC blackout and resulting baby boom is apparently false.
• Improv thoughts from Jill Bernard [video] (related).

Always feel free to send me any interesting sites or articles you come across.

Emptying the Bottle: Mid-September '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• Business is more about being organized and managing than it is about ideas.
• To pay for a WWII today, it would cost the government $20 trillion.
• How an economist gets his kids to sleep in the car.
• There may be different kinds of smart, but learning style assessments are useless.
• Desire for exercise may be genetic (earlier).
• Alcohol is good for your health because of the relaxation and relationships.
• The oddity that is government owned liquor monopolies.
• The best anti-penny rant ever [video].
• Crazy campaign speech or pro wrestler [video].
• Reserve your name at About.Me.
• Europe and the United States described as a third world country.
• Students who drank at home reported more heavy drinking early in college.

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Quiet Resolutions

Last New Year's I made five public resolutions, attempting to diversify my risk of failing. One month later I admitted failure. Three months after that I posted that perhaps my ability to drop unattainable goals is actually good for my mental health. Well it turns out all that talk may have actually been counterproductive. According to entrepreneur Derek Sivers, talking about your goals actually makes you less likely to complete them. Much like the moral math I mentioned recently. Telling people your plans makes you feel good, even though you haven't done the hard work yet. The mind is tricked into thinking you've already completed the goal and you haven't even started. So next time I tell you what my resolutions are, doubt me.

Outsourcing Babies to India

Here's the story:

Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less.

There is certainly some problems with the markets, such as buyers changing their minds and unforeseen health risks. But it seems most of the problems can be corrected by better and clearer contracts. And let's not forget that we don't all have the same choices or the same preferences. What seem like exploitation to one may be financial empowerment to another.

Hat tip to the Freakonomics blog.

Emptying the Bottle: Mid-August '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• What it looks like when economists try to lose weight.
• Practical suggestions for threatening situations.
• Voting in churches makes you more likely to vote conservatively.
• Dutch council helps jobless women find rich men to marry (earlier).
• Good advice for any presentation.
• Immigration and the protection racket.
• Why you should reveal more about yourself.
• Commuting is bad for your health (earlier).
• China is richer than... El Salvador.
• Good summary of the last 10 years.

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Healthy Healthy Relationships

I've mentioned before how I think resolved conflict and dedication lead to rich relationships. But here's some evidence on the health benefits to them:

The benefit of friends, family and even colleagues turns out to be just as good for long-term survival as giving up a 15-cigarette-a-day smoking  habit. And by the study's numbers, interpersonal social networks are more crucial to physical health than exercising or beating obesity.

Here's why:

Social relationships are thought to help improve health either by buffering individuals from stressful situations or creating a norm of healthful behaviors.

"There's a pretty large literature linking social relationships to a variety of physiological processes that are linked to disease risk," Holt-Lunstad says. Social support has been linked to lower blood pressure, and a diverse collection of contacts is associated with better immune system functioning.

It seems the more healthy relationships you can foster, the better off you are (barring passion fatigue). So skip the gym today and go grab a smoke with a friend. And it's worth noting, although therapy is helpful, it isn't a replacement for real relationship.