Author Archives: caitlinburke

LOL Hairy Mammals Like Petting

Nature has published an article about the neurons that appear to be associated with enjoying being petted or stroked. The authors did their research with mice, but they enlisted cats — which are, after all, noted experts in the areas of mice and, of course, of being petted — to explain their work to the general public.

Genetic identification of C fibres that detect massage-like stroking of hairy skin in vivo

What It Means to Be Thin

I have always been a fairly capable athlete, but my weight has bounced around a little over the years, particularly as my allergies and asthma have worsened. A few years ago, I had my treatment regimen reorganized, and while it took some time for everything to work smoothly, it was particularly nice to be able to step up my physical activity again.

In 2011, as winter approached, I decided I’d like to have a home option for a good workout on days I didn’t feel like riding my bike, and I got a rowing machine. That’s when I realized how much difference the better medical management made. Within 6 months, my body fat percentage, already well within the healthy range, dropped by 25%. I looked different. Lean.

Anyone who has lost a lot of weight has encountered this: people remark on it, and it’s usually positive, if clumsy, but all kinds of loaded terms come out. Skinny. Thin. Sometimes people we are close to have a negative response when we make a big change in exercise pattern or appearance, and the comments are frankly unkind. They may make fun of choosing fruit instead of a cookie, or warn against losing any more weight.

When my body fat percentage dropped, I only lost a few pounds. I replaced about 70% of the fat weight with lean body mass, tested before and after by BOD POD. (I had suspected my body would change, and I was interested to see how.) But I still got remarks like “too thin,” and expressions of concern. People with a chronic illness can become very lean, after all, even if there are no body-image issues at play, and I had been having health problems. Assuming that those remarks came from a place of caring, I tried to explain that my athletic performance was increasing in pretty much every way, but the only people who really engage with that line of reasoning are already doing the same things and, if anything, bring it up more likely to see if they can adopt your approach.

Over the winter holiday week, my mother and I were talking about some frustrations I’d experienced, and how I was feeling better overall. She made a lot of “thin” remarks last year, and it was a little frustrating, especially because I felt it was clear that my performance was improving. And she said, “I just remember you saying years ago that you felt that being thin equaled being depressed.”

She’s absolutely right, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it. I am deeply sorry she had even a moment’s concern over why my body was changing so much, especially now that I have also realized that being heavier was part of the same problem. What matters to me now is keeping it all in balance: activity, food, sleep, well-being. Plus giving a little more thought to what people are trying to say when they comment on the surface.

Errol Morris on Dunning-Kruger and Other Blind Spots

I have just finished reading A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris’s recent book, about the trials of Jeffrey MacDonald. For the first half of the book, I remember feeling that painful tension of being persuaded by an argument when you already know it has failed. As I got closer to the end, I actually found myself saying out loud, “This guy is never getting out.” Never ever. I then came to a passage in which a member of the Innocence Project says it seemed like MacDonald was convicted and failed his appeals because he is a jerk.

Decades in prison for a crime you didn’t commit could easily make a saint into a pretty big jerk, but it seems he rubbed people the wrong way from the beginning. He also didn’t seem to have any self-awareness about it – he was able to articulate peevish objections when people complained about his manner or affect but not able to make the leap that the responses he was getting, as unfair as they may have seemed to him, contained useful information for him.

MacDonald’s fate was probably sealed by the wide sales of Joe McGinnis’s Fatal Vision, a book concluding he was guilty, which was promoted in a “60 Minutes” special and ultimately made into a television miniseries. MacDonald’s manner was such that even Janet Malcolm, who went on to write a book critical of McGinnis’s problematic book, actively avoided reading the correspondence she received from MacDonald, finding it overwhelming and claiming that she could not learn anything from the evidence – that it was necessarily unable to inform, because one’s interpretation is inevitably colored by his (or her) preconceptions (a position that is trivially reasonable but ultimately seems to deny the value of having a court system at all, or indeed any other search for understanding).

This thicket of meaning and self-awareness has been at the center of Morris’s interests for quite some time, and he addressed several such deficits in a series of articles at the New York Times, beginning with a neat summation, Something’s wrong but you’ll never know what it is (part 1).

Morris gets this wonderful quote from David Dunning, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University:

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Brilliant. I have it posted in my office at work. I mean, Rumsfeld’s remarks. Anyway, Morris draws Dunning out some more, and it’s well worth reading, as are Morris’s explorations into how this plays out in detective work and medicine.

Here are parts 2 through 5:

The Illness of Doubt: Everyone Poisons Himself in His Own Way
Doctors Everywhere
Belief Is Not a Monolithic Thing
Honest Feedback

Dunning and Kruger published Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments in 1999. This is a fascinating paper, and was even a winner of one of my favorite awards, the Ig Nobel prize, in 2000. Yes, it is funny, and it will definitely make you think. And once you start thinking about it, you may find it hard to stop considering what is perhaps the most fundamentally limiting cognitive bias of them all.

The Side Effects Tell You It’s Working

If you go by American Psychiatric Association diagnosis standards, half of us meet the criteria for mental illness at some point in our lives. And sometimes it seems like all of us are on antidepressants. But do we need to be?

It is important that clinical trials, particularly those dealing with subjective conditions like depression, remain double-blind, with neither patients nor doctors knowing whether or not they are getting a placebo. That prevents both patients and doctors from imagining improvements that are not there, something that is more likely if they believe the agent being administered is an active drug instead of a placebo. Faced with his findings that nearly any pill with side effects was slightly more effective in treating depression than an inert placebo, Kirsch speculated that the presence of side effects in individuals receiving drugs enabled them to guess correctly that they were getting active treatment – and this was borne out by interviews with patients and doctors – which made them more likely to report improvement. He suggests that the reason antidepressants appear to work better in relieving severe depression than in less severe cases is that patients with severe symptoms are likely to be on higher doses and therefore experience more side effects.

—Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” [emphasis mine]

Beyond Resolutions – to Action

Tis the season for resolutions, for big, sweeping goals worthy of a year-long timeline. And that is part of the problem. Few people have ever planned a year-long project, even if they have made resolutions all their lives. Another problem is that people often make resolutions that are about habits. Many of us can just gut it out if we have to get a specific thing done in a particular time frame, but creating habits – or worse, breaking them – is about more than just determination.

Many people frame habit-focused resolutions as if they are single-destination goals. Weight loss is the perfect example. Losing weight may be treated as a black box (“I will lose 30 pounds”), without much thought to why or how. Anyone who does go to the gym sees this type of Resolution Maker for a few weeks every January, by which point there’s a crisis at home or work, or they become injured, or worse they find their weight has plateaued or even risen, and they lose momentum and stop showing up.

And then there is the foundational problem: framing a goal without really exploring the motivation. Do I lose 30 pounds because I want to fit into those pants I love? Because my doctor told me my cholesterol is too high? Or because I believe that at my height I should have a specific weight? Sometimes we know the “real reason” and paper it over with one that is easier to speak aloud, which makes it even harder to reach our goals.

This is exactly the battle that knowing is half of. Some goals are worth examining and discarding – I’d place “I should weigh a specific number of pounds” in that category, not least because your weight can fluctuate by a surprisingly large amount through normal activity during the day. Others are worth understanding so that you can see your success – taking measurements on your path to those pants, or doing follow-up lab tests.

And then there’s the challenging part: devising a plan to reach the goal. Most of us have learned that you should break up big tasks into smaller, manageable parts, but that’s not always as easy as it seems, and breaking the big task up is just another item on the to-do list. Maybe tomorrow. Rather than wait for motivation to strike, maybe it’s time to start even smaller than that.

BJ Fogg runs the Persuasive Technology lab at Stanford University. He’s been pioneering a habit-changing methodology that he calls Tiny Habits. The basic point is that you can be highly motivated but still not change your behavior, because it’s hard. It may not even be that big a deal, but it’s big enough, and that’s OK.

With Tiny Habits, he encourages people to choose very small actions that they’d like to make habitual, things that can be accomplished in less than 30 seconds, and simply do them for 5 days. He also asks you to anchor your new habit to something you already do. “When I get up in the morning, I’ll stretch for 30 seconds.” He has an accountability option at his site, too – join, and for 5 days, you’ll receive a daily email simply asking whether you performed your tiny habits.

It takes longer than 5 days to fully embrace a new habit, especially if it’s very new, but 5 days is long enough to get a gut check on what’s working and what isn’t. Fogg invites you to think about what worked and what didn’t, and to revise accordingly.

This is what makes advice like “take the stairs instead of the elevator” or “park at the furthest spot in the parking lot” work well for people. But Fogg makes it even easier. His small approach reminds us that it’s not absolute – we choose a consistent, daily anchor to help cue us to practice the new habit, but that may be one opportunity of several to take a specific action. So we start by taking the stairs only when we get to the office in the morning. And he reminds us that it’s OK to change course, which opens the door not only to finding a better way but to expanding our effort or commitment as we become able to do so.

Have you used Tiny Habits, or another “start small” approach to make a change? How did it go?

Close to Nature

I started swimming a couple of months ago. I have always been a person who could get around in the water, but I had never learned any proper swimming strokes. I was inefficient.

I had tried to take classes but without much success. I don’t really enjoy group activities, and adult swim classes tend to be pitched wrong for me. I am a pretty good athlete in general, and comfortable in the water.

I finally signed up for a series of one-on-one sessions with a coach, and it’s something I should have done years ago. Within a week or so, I was swimming regularly at Aquatic Park, an outdoor swim area with an almost 300-meter buoy line. I go a few times a week now, and I always have a good time.

Mostly. Lately the park has attracted a couple of sea lions. For several weeks, it seemed like this was limited to somewhat shy visits from a younger male, who mostly hung around just outside the swimming area. He seemed hesitant, maybe even safe.

But people have been bitten at this beach before, although rarely. The consensus on the “rogue sea lion” in 2006 was that he was somehow ill.

Well, OK, this isn't what happened, but this is about how I felt about it.

That doesn’t make me feel any better about the large, adult male sea lion that visited Aquatic Park yesterday. I saw him as I sat on the beach, about to get out of water, and I wonder how long he’d been gliding around as I was doing my 7 laps. He certainly seemed right at home, swimming well within the swimmers area, past little groups of swimmers that were still in the water, eyeing us all casually.

Here’s hoping he’s healthy and has satisfied his curiosity, and won’t be back.