hecking an ego on the go ...

It's nearly impossible to overtake someone on the roads these days, especially when both parties are on bikes, and even more especially when the bikes are among the more powerful bikes on the market today (loosely, those with engine capacities of 150cc and above), without seemingly causing untold agony and hurt to the ego of the person being overtaken.

I'm not on the road to race. If I overtake someone, it's because of that person being at that place at that time, causing him (or her) to be overtaken.

I would've done the same had that person not been there on the road getting overtaken by me.

So it's not a race, nor an ego boost for me. I am just riding, on my way to wherever I want to go. It's as simple as that!

It surprises me how easily this fact is lost on all of the wannabe road-racers and their egos. Can't a guy just weave through traffic at a little more than "normal" speed just for the heck of it? Does every such instance have to mean that it's a challenge to yet another street race?

I'm not a racer, nor do I pretend to be one. If I am really good at racing, I'll make that my profession, and spend my "off the job" days practicing at some race track.

However, that doesn't mean that I can't sometimes go beyond my comfort zone on the road when conditions permit. It seems like I'll have to carry a disclaimer board every time I want to do this, to prevent unnecessary risk to other road users.

Bloggers' delight!

My family blogs. The whole gang.

And while we post away on irr/relevant topics we shoulder the responsibility of helping each other in what little way we can.

While we are on the subject of the 'Family', I must admit that my family is an unusual bunch. No, there is no domineering patriarch or an emotion supporting matriarch and an ever so lovable/ annoying twin brother who loves getting me in difficult situations and then comically helping me get out of it. He should do stand up, but I digress.

Rather, everyone takes equal importance in sharing different roles.

We have the Dad a.k.a Popz, a seasoned blogger, a lovable person, and a really funny guy with few if not many "dad-jokes" tumbling out alongside really funny one-liners and wicked jibes.

Then we have the Mom a.k.a huggles and to whom hugging comes easily. While I detest being called a 'momma's boy' by certain brats, I would like to confess to them that I'm an abnormal 21 year old who still plays childish games now and then and has invented several weird sounding names to address his mother.

FYI, I'm a hug person rather than a handshake person for as long as I can remember, thanks to her.

Then there is the Twin, the one fellow who not just looks, talks, walks like me but is also an extremely funny, annoying, and yet entertaining sibling. I have to say this even if tears well up in my eyes, that I would really miss him when we go our separate ways later on in life.

Well, that's my family. Small in size but big on love.

Kudos to the first family of awesomeness!

P.S : Here are their individual blog addresses.

Popz: http://naikmm.blogspot.com/
Huggles: http://whisperinthewoods.blogspot.com/
worsthalf: http://worldofalok.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Truth Revealed humorously...

Not every conversation in the White House stays private. A passing maintenance man, an intern, and the public gets wind of what’s going on behind the scenes.

That is exactly what happened here, though I won’t be revealing any sources. Who knows when the next juicy bit of inside information will be revealed. I can also reveal some good news, at least one of these problems was solved before it got too messy.

The overheard conversation was between Karl Rove, Bush’s Brain, and George himself.

You’re not looking well Mr. President how do you feel.

Well I’m a little, you know indigestated, but I feel like my performance is way up.

You look, well, you look a little constipated.

I suppose I am, but a president needs to be at top performance you know and sacrifice at the country.

Why of course you need to stay at top performance, but what does that have to do with constipation.

It’s not real bad yet. I just need to work out some details on this performance thing.

George you’re not making much sense. What the hell are you talking about? George have you started doing something new without checking it with me first. Have you forgotten George. I’m your brain. They even wrote a book about it.

Yes I know Karl they wrote another god forsaken book about how smart you are. Well I’m pretty smart too. I read it on the Internets. Some Instapudding site said I was wiley and some others Americans called warbuggers like me too. They all said I’m plenty smart.

Yes George you’re smart but you didn’t answer my question. Did you do something new that you haven’t told me about.

Okay well yes I did that corked thing. You know to enhance my performance.

What corked thing, what are you talking about?

God Karl for being so smart don’t you even read the sports page. I mean I know it was illegal for Sammy to cork his butt, but that’s because they have a rule against it in baseball. I’m a president I’m not a baseball player if I can do something to enhance my performance there’s no rule against it. Sammy said he did it for his fans and I have fans too.

I don’t know how to tell you this George

Just say it like you always do Karllll.

Sammy’s problem was with a corked bat George not a corked butt.

Are you sure Karl

Yes George I’m sure.

Karl have our guys found any of the weapons we made destructive.

You mean weapons of mass destruction.

Yea those.

I told you about the mobile biological labs didn’t I.

Yes, but people are asking me questions I can’t answer.

Like what?

Well they want to know how a semi-trailer truck is a weapon. Were the Iraqis going to run over people or what.

No George they were going to use it to make bugs and chemicals and then unleash those against our troops.

Come on Karl, your telling me they had bugs and the bugs were on a leash and they were going to let them off the leash and that was dangerous. Our troops could just take their size twelve boots and stomp on the bugs. I need something more than that.

George the bugs are invisible. They are so small that people can’t see them.

You mean like all those other weapons you said they had and now we can’t find. I’m confused.

Never mind about the biological weapons just tell them the labs created chemical weapons, you know what chemicals are right?

Sure I’m not dumb you know.

Yes George. Tell them about the mustard gas they could have produced.

God Karl you’re telling me to explain about the chemicals and now you’re telling me about gas. I know all about gas. You know I’m feeling better after that cork thing though now I have a little gas of my own. It’s pretty bad but if you just hold your nose. Karl, why can’t people just hold their noses if they encounter this mustard gas stuff.

George mustard gas burns the skin it is really nasty stuff.

Yes, well mine sometimes burns a little too.

Never mind George just tell them that you’ll reveal the truth when we find it.

Yes, okay Karl I’ll tell them that.

Why Russians Don’t Get Depressed

The saddest short story I’ve ever read is “The Overcoat,” by Gogol. (It starts out bleak and only gets bleaker.) The second saddest story is “Grief,” by Chekhov. (Nabokov famously said that Chekhov wrote “sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness.”) And then, if I had to make a list of really depressing fiction, I’d probably put everything written by Dostoyevsky. Those narratives never end well.

Notice a theme? Russians write some seriously sad stuff. This has led to the cultural cliche of Russians as a brooding people, immersed in gloomy moods and existential despair. In a new paper in Psychological Science, Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan summarize this stereotype:

One needs look no further than the local Russian newspaper or library to find evidence supporting this belief [that Russians are sad] – brooding and emotional suffering are common themes in Russian discourse. These observations, coupled with ethnographic evidence indicating that Russians focus more on unpleasant memories and feelings than Westerners do, have led some researchers to go so far as to describe Russia as a “clinically masochistic” culture.

This cliche raises two questions. Firstly, is it true? And if it is true, then what are the psychological implications of thinking so many sad thoughts?

The first experiment was straightforward. The psychologists gave subjects in Moscow and Michigan a series of vignettes that described a protagonist who either does or does not analyze her feelings when she is upset. After reading the short stories, the students were then asked to choose the protagonist that most closely resembled their own coping tendencies. The results were clear: While the American undergraduates were evenly divided between people who engaged in self-analysis (the brooders) and those who didn’t, the Russian students were overwhelmingly self-analytical. (Eighty-three Russians read the vignettes; sixty-eight of them identified with the brooders.) In other words, the cliche is true: Russians are ruminators. They are obsessed with their problems.

At first glance, this data would seem like really bad news for Russian mental health. It’s long been recognized, for instance, that the tendency to ruminate on one’s problems is closely correlated with depression. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the process of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) The mental version of rumination has a darker side, as it leads people to fixate on their flaws and mistakes, preoccupied with their problems. What separates depression from ordinary sadness is the intensity of these ruminations, and the tendency of depressed subjects to get stuck in a recursive loop of negativity.

According to Grossman and Kross, however, not all brooders and ruminators are created equal. While American brooders showed extremely high levels of depressive symptomatology (as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI), Russian brooders were actually less likely to be depressed than non-brooders. This suggests that brooding, or ruminative self-reflection, has extremely different psychiatric outcomes depending on the culture. While rumination makes Americans depressed, it actually seems to provide an emotional buffer for Russians.

What explains these cultural differences? Grossman and Kross then asked students in Moscow and Michigan to “recall and analyze their “deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding a recent anger-related interpersonal experience”. Then, the subjects were quizzed about the details of their self-analysis. They were asked to rate, on a seven point scale, the extent to which they adopted a self-immersed perspective (a 1 rating meant that they “saw the event replay through your own eyes as if you were right there”) versus a self- distanced perspective (a 7 rating meant that they “watched the event unfold as an observer, in which you could see yourself from afar”). Finally, the subjects were asked about how the exercise made them feel. Did they get angry again when they recalled the “anger-related” experience? Did the memory trigger intense emotions?

Here’s where the cultural differences became clear.* When Russians engaged in brooding self-analysis, they were much more likely to engage in self-distancing, or looking at the past experience from the detached perspective of someone else. Instead of reliving their confused and visceral feelings, they reinterpreted the negative memory , which helped them make sense of it. According to the researchers, this led to significantly less “emotional distress” among the Russian subjects. (It also made them less likely to blame another person for the event.) Furthermore, the habit of self-distancing seemed to explain the striking differences in depressive symptoms between Russian and Americans. Brooding wasn’t the problem. Instead, it was brooding without self-distance. Here’s Grossman and Kross:

Our results highlighted a psychological mechanism that explains these cultural differences: Russians self-distance more when analyzing their feelings than Americans do. These findings add to a growing body of research demonstrating that it is possible for people to reflect either adaptively or maladaptively over negative experiences. In addition, they extend previous findings cross-culturally by highlighting the role that self-distancing plays in determining which type of self-reflection—the adaptive or maladaptive one—different cultures engage in.

The lesson is clear: If you’re going to brood, then brood like a Russian. Just remember to go easy on the vodka.

*I think cross-cultural studies like this are an important reminder than American undergrads are W.E.I.R.D.

Your fleeting smile….
Whiff of summer warmth….
Remains in thought…
Ever ….forever…

Gut Bacteria Give Super Seaweed-Digestion Power to Japanese

The old adage, “You are what you eat,” has a bacterial component.

In a neat confluence of human history, stomach bacteria and food, researchers have found that the intestinal microbes of Japanese people may be souped up for eating seaweed.

“In a marine bacteria, we identified an enzyme that is very specialized for degrading algal cell walls,” said Mirjam Czjzek, a biologist at France’s Station Biologique de Roscoff. “The only other place we find this enzyme is in the human-gut bacteria of Japanese individuals.”

The discovery, described April 7 in Nature, started with Roscoff biologist Jan-Hendrik Hehemann’s analysis of Zobellia galactanivorans, a common marine bacteria. In it, he found an enzyme that breaks down porphyran, a carbohydrate found in the cell walls of red algae.

The gene that codes for the enzyme has been found in one other place: the genome of Bacteroides plebeius, a microbe found in human intestines. However, not all B. plebeius strains produce the algae-crunching enzyme. It has only been found in Japanese people.

According to the researchers, the enzyme helps Z. galactanivorans eat red algae, which westerners know best as the nori seaweed wrapping around sushi rolls. At some unknown points and in some unknown stomachs in the Japanese past, the enzyme-coding gene passed from Z. galactanivorans and into B. plebeius. That lucky microbe would have benefited from a new-found ability to process red algae, spreading through its stomach environment and eventually through the human population, which in turn derived more nutrients from an algae-rich diet.

Humans are known to benefit from digestive enzymes produced by the trillions of microbes in each person’s intestines, but “I don’t think anyone’s ever shown an ethnic difference like this,” said Andrew Gewirtz, an Emory University immunologist who studies the role of gut bacteria in obesity. “It’s perfectly logical, and fits with ideas that scientists have kicked around.”

How much the new gene helps people digest seaweed hasn’t yet been quantified. The microbes’ fate in people with seaweed-free diets is uncertain.

The researchers also don’t know when the gene jumped from marine to human microbes, though Czjzek suspects it happened long ago. As for whether other people have seaweed-processing strains, the study isn’t absolutely conclusive. It looked only at the gut microbes of 18 westerners — enough to suggest a pattern, but not a final word, though the chances are probably low.

“Often the question comes, ‘I’ve been eating sushi for two years now. Do I have this enzyme?’ The answer is, these are very rare events,” said Czjzek. “In the early days, seaweed wasn’t sterilized. Nowadays, it’s cooked, roasted and prepared. The chance to have this type of transfer is much lower.”

That’s likely the case with most types of food, said Gewirtz. As for whether “that’s a good or a bad thing, it’s hard to say,” he said. But Justin Sonnenburg, a Stanford University microbiologist who wrote a commentary accompanying the findings, is concerned.

“Consumption of hyper-hygienic, mass-produced, highly-processed and calorie-dense foods is testing how rapidly the microbiota of individuals in industrialized countries can adapt while being deprived of the environmental reservoirs of microbial genes,” he wrote.

However, globalized diets do give people a chance to eat foods they wouldn’t have found before. “The next time you take a bite of an unfamiliar food, think about the microbial inhabitants you may also be ingesting, and the possibility that you will be providing one of your 10 trillion closest friends with a new set of utensils,” wrote Sonnenburg.

Image Courtesy: Javier Lastras/Flickr.

Alcoholism

Brendan Koerner has a really fantastic article in the latest Wired on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It’s a fascinating exploration of the organization, from its hallucinogen inspired birth (Bill Wilson was tripping on belladonna when he found God in a hospital room) to the difficulty of accurately measuring the effectiveness of AA:

The group’s “cure rate” has been estimated at anywhere from 75 percent to 5 percent, extremes that seem far-fetched. Even the most widely cited (and carefully conducted) studies are often marred by obvious flaws. A 1999 meta-analysis of 21 existing studies, for example, concluded that AA members actually fared worse than drinkers who received no treatment at all. The authors acknowledged, however, that many of the subjects were coerced into attending AA by court order. Such forced attendees have little shot at benefiting from any sort of therapy–it’s widely agreed that a sincere desire to stop drinking is a mandatory prerequisite for getting sober.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that while AA is certainly no miracle cure, people who become deeply involved in the program usually do well over the long haul.

In a 2006 study, for example, two Stanford psychiatrists chronicled the fates of 628 alcoholics they managed to track over a 16-year period. They concluded that subjects who attended AA meetings frequently were more likely to be sober than those who merely dabbled in the organization.

The University of New Mexico’s Tonigan says the relationship between first-year attendance and long-term sobriety is small but valid: In the language of statistics, the correlation is around 0.3, which is right on the borderline between weak and modest (0 meaning no relationship, and 1.0 being a perfect one-to-one relationship).

Koerner also investigates AA from the perspective of the brain. He focuses on the prefrontal cortex, that chunk of tissue behind the forehead that allows us to exert self-control, to order club soda instead of whiskey:

As dependence grows, alcoholics also lose the ability to properly regulate their behavior. This regulation is the responsibility of the prefrontal cortex, which is charged with keeping the rest of the brain apprised of the consequences of harmful actions. But mind-altering substances slowly rob the cortex of so-called synaptic plasticity, which makes it harder for neurons to communicate with one another. When this happens, alcoholics become less likely to stop drinking, since their prefrontal cortex cannot effectively warn of the dangers of bad habits.

This is why even though some people may be fully cognizant of the problems that result from drinking, they don’t do anything to avoid them. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, my family is falling apart, I’ve been arrested twice,’” says Peter Kalivas, a neuroscientist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “They can list all of these negative consequences, but they can’t take that information and manhandle their habits.”

The loss of synaptic plasticity is thought to be a major reason why more than 90 percent of recovering alcoholics relapse at some point.

It’s now possible to see these changes in the prefrontal cortex at an extremely precise level. Interestingly, one of the most important changes has to do with how alcoholics (and addicts in general) process “prediction error” signals. In essence, a prediction error signal occurs when we expect to get a reward – and it doesn’t matter if the reward is money, sex, praise or drugs – and we instead get nothing (or maybe even a negative outcome).

The brain processes this disappointment as a prediction error. As Wolfram Schultz and others have demonstrated, such prediction errors are an incredibly efficient way to learn about the world, allowing us to update our internal models (all those predictions of good stuff) in light of our mistakes.

This is an essential aspect of decision-making, as it allows us to avoid the mindless repetition of mistakes. Just look at what happens to monkeys when their prediction error pathway is surgically disrupted. The experiment went like this: monkeys were given a joystick that moved in two different directions. At any given moment, only one of the movements would trigger a reward (a pellet of food). To make things more interesting, the scientists switched the direction every twenty-five trials. If the monkeys had previously gotten in the habit of lifting the joystick in order to get a food pellet, they now had to shift their strategy.

So what did the monkeys do? Animals with an intact prediction error pathway had no problem with the task. As soon as they stopped receiving rewards for lifting the joystick – this generated a prediction error – they started turning it in the other direction, which meant they continued to receive their pellets of food.

However, monkeys that were missing their prediction error machinery demonstrated a telling defect. When they stopped being rewarded for moving the joystick in a certain direction, they were still able (most of the time) to change directions, just like a normal monkey. However, they were unable to persist in this successful strategy, and soon went back to moving the joystick in the direction that garnered no reward. They never learned how to consistently find the food, to turn a mistake into an enduring lesson.

What do prediction errors have to do with addiction? One way to think about addiction is the abuse of a substance despite serious adverse consequences.

We think the alcohol will make us happy – and it does, for a few minutes – but the drug will also lead to withdrawal, hangovers, ruined relationships, an empty wallet, etc. In other words, the costs of the drink far exceed its fleeting rewards.

Why, then, do addicts keep on drinking? One possible explanation is that addicts can’t properly process their prediction errors, so that all those negative outcomes get ignored. (In other words, we’re like those monkeys who keep on pressing the joystick in the wrong direction.) The end result is that we never learn from our very costly decision-making mistakes.

A new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience by Soyoung Q Park, et. al. provides compelling support for this hypothesis. The scientists began by giving twenty “abstinent alcohol-dependent patients” a simple reinforcement learning task featuring green smiling faces (positive feedback) and red frowning faces (negative feedback).

The first thing to note is that it took the alcoholic patients significantly longer to figure out the game than a group of control subjects. Because the game was played inside an fMRI machine, the scientists were able to analyze the neural differences that led to the learning problems.

Interestingly, the alcoholic patients didn’t have a problem generating prediction errors in the striatum, the dopaminergic source of the prediction error signal. When they made a bad guess and saw the red frowning face, their addicted brains looked identical to brains of control subjects. Both groups instantly and automatically recognized their mistakes.

It’s what happened next that begins to explain the errant behavior of addicts. In the control group, this prediction error signal was quickly passed along to the prefrontal cortex, which used this new information to modulate future decisions. As a result, the control brain was able to quickly learn from its mistakes and minimize the number of red frowning faces.

The alcoholic brain wasn’t nearly as adept. Park et. al. found that, at least in this small group of addicted patients, there appeared to a connectivity problem between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex. As a result, when these subjects made a mistake, their prefrontal cortex wasn’t fully informed – there was a reduced amount of “feedback-related modulation” – and this lack of modulation correlated with 1) an inability to succeed at the simple learning task and 2) the magnitude of their alcohol craving. (This data extends similar results observed in smokers.)

In other words, the addicts who couldn’t internalize their prediction errors were the most addicted. This suggests that it is the inability to learn from mistakes – even when these mistakes are destroying our life – that makes addiction so damn hard to escape.

Now here’s some blatant speculation.

I think one reason AA is successful, at least for many of those who commit to the program, is that it’s designed to force people to confront their prediction errors.

Just look at the twelve steps AA uses, many of which are all about the admission of mistakes, from step number 1 (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable”) to step number 8 (“Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all”) to step number 10 (“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it”).

I’d suggest that the presence of these steps helps people break through the neuromodulatory problem of addiction, as the prefrontal cortex is forced to grapple with its massive failings and flaws.

Because unless we accept our mistakes we will keep on making them.