Throughout my grown-up life, I've been at the receiving end of a lot of envy. "How on earth can you manage to eat so much and stay so slim?". Two articles from the NYTIMES of the last week have suddenly helped me come up with answers.

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

by James Vlahos suggests that my physical restlessness is part of the explanation. He describes experiments that closely monitor people's activity levels (using underwear with built-in sensors that register movement and posture) and food intake.  Some participants gained weight, while others didn't. The difference between the two groups wasn't some weird metabolic factor, but how much they moved. Both groups were forbidden to exercise, so that wasn't the decisive factor.  Instead, it was how much time they spent on their feet, moving around, or simply fidgeting.

On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.And when they sat, electrical activity in the muscles went down - the way the hum in a theater dies down when the curtains start moving apart. Calorie-burning rate immediately plunged to about one per minute, a third of what it would have been if they'd been up and walking. Insulin effectiveness dropped. The enzymes responsible for taking fats out of the bloodstream, plunged.

Is Sugar Toxic?by Gary Taubes strongly suggests that my (relative) lack of interest in sugar is another part of the explanation. The story has two suspects called "Sugar" (Sucrose) and HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). The crime they are suspected of, is nothing less than the tremendous increase over the last 50 years, of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

If the suspects are guilty, the article goes, it's probably because they share one property: When they're broken down in the intestine, 50-55% of them get turned into Fructose, which has to be digested by the liver. Unfortunately, the liver has a tendency to turn Fructose into fat if it's given too much. And "too much" might turn out to be a much smaller quantity than most people think.

- o 0 o -

While I was writing this, another vision popped into my head. Those fat cells that we're complaining about, aren't alien invaders. They are parts of us, and they have only one way to defend themselves, when we try to slim them out of existence: They complain, and make us feel miserable. Wouldn't you have done the same, in their place?


:-J

How to save a trillion dollars?

Do you remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes?  I had a moment like that today, when I read yesterday's column in the NYTIMES by Mark Bittman. His message is that the giantic deficit in the US economy amounts to a rounding error, compared with the Federal Budget's share of the cost of our lifestyle diseases.

It's a surreal moment. It's like having an elephant in the room. An elephant that's grown big enough to almost choke off the world's richest economy. And what are our politicians doing? They're bringing the Federal Govenment to the brink of a shutdown in a show over how to shrink the "ronding error" without raising people's taxes.

How big is the elephant going to be next year? And why not raise the taxes? Don't most Americans have more than enough money to eat themselves to death? Isn't it in fact the very convenience of it all, the living standard that we're trying to raise, that's killing us?

As human beings, we have evolved with a very fine balance between appetite for food on the one hand, and our dislike of walking on the other.  If our ancestors wanted to eat dinner, they had to hunt it or gather it, or both. Imagine having to walk five miles for your dinner. Imagine getting only a half portion, and having to walk five more miles for the other half. That's the kind of resistance that your appetite evolved to overcome.

The older you got, and the more your joints ached, the stronger your appetite had to be, in order to get you to feed yourself. In the end, you starved to death. Today, you're more likely to eat yourself to death. It's a big difference.

:-(

Clicker training

In Karen Pryor's latest book,

Reaching The Animal Mind,

she tells about her life as a trainer of animals and humans, and elaborates further on the ideas of the "clicker training" that she helped develop. The first half of the book held my attention steadily, and I ploughed through the pages at a steady pace.

It was in the the second half that I began to take notes, when I realized that she was drawing lines between operant conditioning on the one hand, and what Temple called the "Blue Ribbon Emotions" on the other. This helps explain more of what I called in an earlier post the difference between "training" and "learning".


* Opererant conditioning ("training") is fast because it bypasses the Cortex. It addresses the primitive parts of the brain directly. The signal hardly has to be modulated or interpreted at all.

* The effects of operant conditioning lasts for a long time, because operant conditioning establishes an extremely short and simple link between information and its usefulness. The brain seems to be "wired" to keep information longer in memory, the more useful it appears to be.

* The effects of operant conditioning can be hard to undo through "teaching", because the traffic from the primitive parts of the brain (like the Amygdala, which controls fear responses) is largely one-way. The Amygdala knows how to talk to the Neocortex, but the Neocortex has practically no way to talk to the Amygdala. Or so Karen Proyr says.

This is bad news if you've been accidentally conditioned to have an aversive reaction to stuff like homework, and are trying to reason your way out of it.  In fact, the only way to undo the damage, seems to be through new operant conditioning.

* Mixing sticks and carrots (rewards and punishments) is worse than we tend to think, because the two are handled by different parts of the brain. Fear responses are handled by the Amygdala, while the positive reinforcement is handled by the Hypothalamus. Activating both centres of the brain at the same time, does not improve the efficiency of the training.

* Operant conditioning can be great fun because it stimulates the SEEKING system in the primitive brain. This is the primary emotion that drives us to go out window-shopping, travelling, exploring, etc. Getting a good chance to explore something can be extremely rewarding ...


... which may be why I have enjoyed this book so much
(along with her previous book "Don't Shoot the Dog", which is an excellent textbook on operant conditioning).




PS: An afterthought: Could it be that the SEEKING emotion is the reason why we get addicted to computer games? Could it be because these games offer us a constant barrage of opportunities to find out "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?"