Smart Drug Smarts has been on an extended summer vacation since the start of July, and I feel I owe everyone an explanation.

Of course, a really good explanation would have come before-the-fact, rather than now — but honestly, I didn’t think at the beginning I would take an extended break. Or that it would last this long once it had started.

What’s going on?

First off: there’s no cause for alarm. I remain healthy, happy, cognitively intact, and deeply enamored of all things neuroscience.

However, throughout 2018 I’ve felt increasingly pulled in different directions (more on this below), and that I was failing to give Smart Drug Smarts its full measure of time and attention that it deserves, and that I was used to delivering over the past few years.

I’ve been vacillating over whether to put out episodes that might not have gotten their full share of love and prep-work, or to loosen up the production schedule a bit, or to just to take a “summer sabbatical.”

In the end — more by default than by an explicit decision — I’ve opted for the latter.

The podcast’s past, present and future.

As you know if you’ve been listening for a while, Smart Drug Smarts began as an exploration of smart drugs and nootropics — as well as providing a crafty excuse to get myself on the phone with neuroscience researchers I didn’t otherwise have an “in” to contact.

As time went by, the show’s subject matter expanded to cover a range of topics related to cognitive enhancement — straying pretty far from the original idea of chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier. We’ve hit hypnotism, psychedelics, and Traumatic Brain Injury, among other topics.

I’ve often wondered if we’d reached the point where I should re-title the show something more like “Jesse’s Brain Exploratorium.” Not that exact name, but something with more truth-in-advertising as to what the show is today.

But I’m not sure (and I’m still undecided, as of this writing) if it would be better to reboot Smart Drug Smarts with fresh branding and a wider array of topics, or to come back from hiatus with episodes more strictly focused on nootropics — or even to put a nice completion-ribbon on Smart Drug Smarts and begin something new, inviting along any listeners who choose to follow.

Each approach has its pros and cons. And I’m still giving it thought.

What else has been keeping my brain busy?

My mental space this year (aside from Smart Drug Smarts) has gone in three main directions. Each one, by itself, contains an infinitely deep warren of rabbit-holes capable of siphoning off attention — which means I’ve been pretty reckless with my mental resources.*

* Guilty as charged. And I’ve certainly made use of nootropics and even sleep-avoidance on more than one night this year. No one is perfect, and I don’t even try to fake it. :)

My three current non-neuroscience fascinations:

• Computer Programming
• National Politics
• Macroeconomic Research

I’ll explain a bit about each one, and why it has gripped me, in case you’re curious.

Computer Programming

I have long been a software developer. (I’ve mentioned on a few episodes that software development is what originally turned me on to smart drugs — the overlap between the nootropics community and the programmer community is large.)

I’ve always had at least a couple side projects in software going at any given time, but this year I’ve started feeling “the itch” to sink my teeth into a software project that is larger and self-directed.

I’ve got my own pop-psychology analysis on why I feel this way at this time, but a) I’m not a big believer in self-analysis, and b) even if I were, I’m not self-indulgent enough to write about it here. But I have been heeding the call, and am currently waist-deep in a code-writing blitz that I’m quite enthusiastic about (although there’s nothing public to see yet).

National Politics

I had been tuned-out to most aspects of U.S. politics for a number of years. Aside from being distinctly disappointed that a number of banking executives weren’t jailed for life following the 2008 economic crisis, I had my blinders on, assuming that politics was plodding along as politics does.

My personal peccadillos — mainly, that I really wish the U.S. government had a coequal branch filled exclusively with scientists and statisticians — seemed fanciful. Other than snarky comments, I was mostly content to ignore day-to-day politics, think instead about what future-tech might do in the future, and stay on the sidelines.

Trump’s being elected president* changed that. Like many people, I feel as if we’ve skipped timelines into the alternate reality from Back to the Future 2 where “Biff” became all-powerful. I’m also well-read in history, and I find the parallels between modern America and the early years of the Third Reich too close to ignore.* I feel obligated to do what I can to help derail America’s authoritarian course, and this too has taken a big chunk of my attention — one that continues to feel warranted.

* If we succeed in U-turning America — which I believe we will — it is probably because of the historical examples we have that weren’t available to citizens of the 20th century’s proto-fascist states. We all owe a debt to the authors, playwrights, novelists and filmmakers who have kept the 1940s alive in our memories for the better part of a century.

Macroeconomic Research

As hinted at above, I was profoundly affected by 2008’s financial crisis, which altered my life trajectory a great deal. In the years after that, I put a mental Post-It note on the fact that my understanding of macroeconomics was quite weak (along with almost everyone else’s), and that at some point I ought to try to find my conceptual footing.

A combination of events last year brought this reminder back to front-of-mind for me.

One was being whip-sawed by the payment processor for Axon Labs, who, over the course of a few months approved and then disapproved our ability to accept credit card payments, for what seemed like infuriating, bureaucratic and nonsensical reasons. This back-and-forth highlighted to me just how reliant I was on major economic players over which I held no sway. (I know, I know — we all are. But this incident rubbed my nose in it in a particularly aggravating way.)

The second event was my recognition that we were on an eight-year uptrend in the US economy (now nine years), and we had a president* with neither a firm understanding of global economics nor the sense to keep his hands off the controls. The economy tends to be cyclical, with periodic major crashes (1987, 2001, 2008…) and the combination of a nine-year winning streak and a criminal nincompoop in the Oval Office made me feel — based more on gut instinct than data — that we’ve got a major market correction coming.

Unlike 2008, when I was a young single guy, I now have a family — and I’m trying to get both educated and better positioned for a changing economic landscape.

What to expect for Smart Drug Smarts?

I love podcasting and I love the community that has grown up around Smart Drug Smarts. And — hopefully needless to say — I remain fascinated by neuroscience and the far-ranging topics I’ve been able to discuss with the show’s hundreds of brilliant guests.

I want to return to Smart Drug Smarts fully recharged, in a big way — and possibly with an updated format for the show. But in order to do that, I’m going to extend my “sabbatical” for a bit longer — probably through the end of the 2018 calendar year — so I can continue to focus attention to these other issues which are also important to me, and are in many ways more time-sensitive.

I thank you — especially if you’ve read all the way here — for the attention you’ve paid to Smart Drug Smarts. I’m both thrilled and flattered that you’ve become a fan of the show.

Stay tuned, stay smart…and count on my re-emergence before too long.

A Less-Than-Planned Sabbatical was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve learned anything at any time in the past four decades, you’ve probably been exposed to the Four Stages of Competence model for skill acquisition. Originally created by Noel Burch in the 1970s, it was first described as the “Four Stages for Learning Any New Skill.” The model was a pyramid structure progressing upward through four phases:

• 1 - Unconscious Incompetence
• 2 - Conscious Incompetence
• 3 - Conscious Competence
• 4 - Unconscious Competence

When you’re learning something like how to ride a bicycle or play the ukulele, you start out completely incompetent (“Unconscious Incompetence”) and aren’t even sure about the parameters of the skill. What do you need to learn? What would success look like? How do you even begin the learning process?

As you get a rough understanding of the domain, you still suck at the skill, but at least you’re starting to know which way is up. This is Conscious Incompetence. You’re terrible, but you’re building up your skills — with heavy concentration, though not much proficiency to show for it.

With enough practice, you work your way into Conscious Competence. You can perform the task, but it requires your attention. You don’t want distractions; this is the kind of task you might perform with your tongue pressed between your lips and your muscles tense for no good reason.

Finally, with enough practice and effort, you reach Unconscious Competence — the promised land in which you can perform the task well without actively thinking about it. Your attention can be elsewhere. Walking, chewing gum, dialing your phone all at once — no problem. You have Unconscious Mastery over each of these skills.

Burch’s paradigm seems pretty all-inclusive. It’s typically drawn as a pyramid, but it also works as a nice, tight 2x2 matrix — two variables, each with two states — that doesn’t appear to allow logical room for any other varieties of skill.

After all — what wouldn’t fit into one of those four categories?

But from what I can tell, John Hopkins University may have just broken the paradigm.

And if you agree that they did so, then you’ll also agree that they did it with a devilishly simple refutation — no fMRIs, no fancy math, no computer models…

They did it with just a simple example which you’ve already seen about 30 times in this very article. 😮

“If you don’t know me by now…”

In 1972, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes released “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” a mournful love song that hit number three in the US Pop charts on its debut and has since been covered by numerous other musicians.

The gist of the song is clear in its title: After enough exposure and ability to scrutinize something, if you still haven’t figured it out, then it’s probably never, ever going to happen.

Despite my cat’s fascination with the red dot from a laser pointer, there’s never going to be a burst of insight where the cat “gets it” and realizes she’s being duped by the small gadget in my hand across the room. She’s forever trapped at Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence.

The cat example fits Burch’s learning model just fine. Because the laser pointer is my tool, not the cat’s. For what it’s worth, I’ve gained Unconscious Competence of the laser pointer. (Please hold your applause until the end.)

But what if there was a tool I use daily — that I use flawlessly—that I couldn’t even identify? And it’s a tool I’ve been trained to use, a human artifact. This isn’t a trick with a cheat-answer like “my lungs” or “sense of balance” or some instinctive skill humans are genetically wired to easily master.

This is a skill in the bicycles-and-ukuleles category.

And it straddles a weird nether region between the first and the fourth layers in Burch’s pyramid: Unconscious Competence overlaid on a total vacancy that anything has been learned at all.

And all this despite having been taught this skill explicitly, and using it daily — near-constantly — ever since.

Gee whiz, can you guess?

The skill that I’m talking about is the use of a tool — in fact, not a physical tool but a symbol.

I’m not going to tell you which symbol just yet. It will be more fun if you take a little test to see for yourself. It’ll only take a moment.

It’s a quiz with one question, self-graded: Click here.

So, did you get it right?

If you read even a little, you see hundreds (probably thousands) of lower-case gs every single day. And in most printed material, which uses common fonts like Calibri and Times New Roman, the version you see is the “looptail g.”

When we’re writing by hand (or reading sans-sarif fonts), we use the “opentail g,” which looks like a circle with a candy-cane hanging off the side.

What’s amazing is that — as recently reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance — despite the immeasurable number of repetitions we get using the looptail g, most of us don’t even have the semantic knowledge that it exists.

If asked to “draw me a g” — we’ll draw the opentail version.

And if asked “which lowercase letters have more than one written version?” we’ll stare blankly, thinking about trick answers involving Spanish accent marks or Greek characters only used in mathematics.

Of 38 adults asked by the Johns Hopkins researchers to “list letters with two lowercase print varieties,” only two of them named g. And only one of those two could write the looptail version correctly.

Kimberly Wong, the study’s first author, explains: “We’d say to them: ‘There are two forms of g. Can you write them?’ And people would just stare because they had no idea. And once you really nudged them, insisting, some would still say there is no second g.”

In a separate experiment, 25 people took the same test you just did above, trying to identify the correct looptail g among four similar versions. Only seven of the 25 got it right — a ratio that could have been expected if they’d been picking an answer at random.

The researchers attribute this finding to the fact that we don’t learn to write this style of g, and we rarely see it on its own. It’s almost always in the context of some full-fledged word — and that word in a sentence, the sentence in a paragraph… Etcetera, etcetera.

According to the study’s senior author Michael McCloskey, “What may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. Looptail g is something we’re never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well.”

I think McCloskey is giving us more credit here than we deserve. It’s not that we don’t know the looptail g “well.” We are ignoramuses about it. We can’t draw it. We can’t pick it out of a line-up. We don’t know it exists. And many people will strenuously argue that it doesn’t exist, even when told otherwise.

It would have been really fun to see videos of the “looptail g deniers” after its existence was revealed in all its stark obviousness.

Does this break the “Four Stages” model?

I’m not sure if the looptail g “discovery” breaks Burch’s model of skill acquisition in an important way.

But it does seem intriguing to find a skill that is so invisible to our conscious experience, but where we still have mastery. I don’t view the looptail g phenomenon as being at all the same as, say, the unconscious mastery of a bicycle. One could argue that bicycle riding is mostly “physical intuition” after we’ve gotten the hang of it, and the actual skills involved are hard to state explicitly…

But no cyclist would deny the existence of bicycles. And you could easily identify a bicycle among a collection of vehicles. Something very different is happening with the looptail g.

Can you think of other instances of “invisible expertise”?

Now that I’m aware of the looptail g enigma…I wonder if more oddities like this are all around us, hiding in plain sight?

PS: Here’s the original Johns Hopkins Press Release describing this study.

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I’ll bet it’s been a while since the alphabet blew your mind. was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s an interesting experiment to ask people to name their choice for the world’s most evil scientist.

Most people will default to fiction. Dr. Moreau and Dr. Frankenstein are both popular choices — the latter inaccurately, as Mary Shelley’s protagonist was actually kind of tragic but well-intentioned.

The problem is, unless you work in the sciences, you probably can’t name a whole lot of scientists — except for the top tier of household-name scientists: the Einsteins, the Salks, the Marie Curies and Louis Pasteurs. However, none of them got famous by doing anything particularly evil. Even scientists who advance weapons technology (e.g. Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project) have strong defenses against moralist finger-pointing. Their defenders can point out that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. And, on balance, strong weapons may deter more violence than they provoke.

So culling through the best known fictional scientists and name-brand science rock stars, there’s no hands-down winner for the Great Dark Sith-Lord of Scientific Evil.

But if we can loosen the qualifications just a bit and not focus so much on the fame ingredient of infamy, candidates start to emerge. Among the viable contestants…

My Runners-Up for Evil Scientist Ignominy

Walter Freeman, the American psychiatrist who popularized the operation now known as the prefrontal lobotomy. “Operation” isn’t really the right term, as the technique he employed took the same hand-eye coordination as operating an egg beater, with similar results. Freeman often did his surgeries in public and liked impressing audiences by “stirring” icepicks in each of a patient’s two eye sockets simultaneously. (He performed these brain overhauls nationwide in a heavily-marketed roadshow, similar to “Trump University” some sixty years later.)

Josef Mengele, the most famous “doctor” in Hitler’s Third Reich. (“Doctor” really seems like the wrong title for this guy, but he sported a medical degree.) The experiments he performed on prisoners remain so stomach-turning even after three-quarters of a century, they almost give curiosity a bad name.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who sold how-to recipes for regional armageddons to North Korea, Gaddafi’s Libya, and more. To date, the fallout from his scientific entrepreneurialism hasn’t reached its worst-case potential — but by any rational risk analysis, the expected value of the human death toll from his technology sales, at Las Vegas odds, would rank him favorably among historic serial killers and mass murderers. (And any guy smart enough to productize a nuclear weapons program is smart enough to have run those numbers.)

Each of these runners-up qualifies as an extremely bad person. The world doesn’t have enough little old ladies needing help crossing the street to ever work off the karmic debt accrued from these sorts of crimes.

Nevertheless, none of them earns the top score for my Least Favorite, Most Evil Scientist.

My pick will probably surprise you. For one thing, he’s a scientist who has never killed anyone. Not even by accident. In fact, held up alongside researchers who routinely sacrifice dozens of rodents in animal studies, even his research methods look tame. And his misdeeds — as grave as I think they are — were motivated (he tells us) by “a quest for aesthetics, for beauty.”

What’s more, he expressed remorse. He did so repeatedly and publicly.

But before I reveal his disreputable identity…

A long fuse gets no respect.

So what is the scariest disease in the world?

People treat this as a trick question, but it’s not meant to be thought-provoking.

The answer is cancer. And there’s very little room for debate. Numerically, cancer’s only rival is heart disease — and with our current medical knowledge, cancer is much less preventable by lifestyle tweaks. If you live long enough, life basically devolves into a game of which cancer will you die from first.

That said, I realize that for many people, the first disease that comes to mind is Ebola. Or maybe the Black Death or Cholera. All of these get their notoriety not based on modern-day deadliness but because of their reputation for killing people fast.

Yes, it’s true that the Black Death killed a significant percent of the medieval population — but people died a lot back then. Most medieval kids never made it to the age of five. The Black Death retains its horrific reputation all these centuries later because it could take a perfectly fit adult in the prime of his life and turn him into a corpse in under 36 hours.

By contrast, colon cancer, arteriosclerosis and black lung are slow, methodical, almost yawn-inducing killers. The near certainty that one of them will get you — assuming that you evade a flashier death from Ebola, shark attack, or satanic cultists — just doesn’t affect us at the same visceral level.

We fear the tossed grenade because we know it’s going to blow in seconds.

But some old stick of dynamite with a half-mile long miner’s fuse? We know that those things smolder forever before they get dangerous. Pass the Doritos.

Faking Science

Of the Evil Scientist runners-up I named above, the first two (Walter Freeman and Josef Mengele) fall into the “Ebola” category of evil scientists. Their victims were right in their offices, mutilated and/or murdered up close and personal. As villainy goes, these are open-and-shut cases.

Abdul Qadeer Khan fits more into the “cancer” model. To date, he hasn’t actually killed anyone. His murders are probabilistic. He has a good chance of killing a large number of people. But the blood on his hands is strictly metaphorical. He’s more like a B-52 pilot flying a sortie over your house at 30,000 feet than an axe murderer kicking in your front door. The end result may be just as bad, but it somehow feels a lot more gentile.

My pick for Most Evil Scientist is also a representative of this second group. What he did was not so much a criminal act as it was a betrayal of trust.

Diederik Stapel was a social psychology professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 2011, he was fired after an academic investigation revealed that he was making up data for his “research” papers. He had a strong reputation, and dozens of his papers had been published in scholarly journals — over 50 of which have subsequently been retracted.

Stapel wasn’t “fudging” numbers, using bad statistical analyses, or flopping his order of hypothesis and data collection — any of which are scientific no-nos. Stapel was just making crap up. He fabricated numbers out of thin air for the purpose of making his graphs look pretty. As scientific sins go, this is like offering up sacrificial infants to Beelzebub.

After getting busted, Stapel expressed “regret” (an easy choice when you’ve been caught red-handed), wrote a tell-all autobiography, and avoided criminal prosecution by trading away some employment benefits and doing 120 hours of community service. To my mind, this sounds like getting off easy to a scandalous extreme.

But does he really qualify as evil?

Am I serious in saying that he beats out a card-carrying Nazi?

A Cancer in the Heart of Science

If you read about his case, Stapel winds up sounding like a scumbag, not a mustache-twirling villain.

And I’ll grant you: that’s exactly what he is.

But mustache-twirling villains are as rare as unicorns. What the world has a dangerous number of…are scumbags. Scumbags are grown-ups smart enough to anticipate the downstream effects of their actions — but for selfish reasons, they look past them or rationalize them. The scumbag child molester doesn’t leave physical bruises on a kid, so he tells himself “the kid is okay” and ignores the psychological suffering that can last a lifetime and amplify over generations.

Diederik Stapel is an all-star of the scumbag category. He’s a social psychologist — which is richly ironic, because of all people, he should recognize what undercutting the public credibility of science can do.

Science has earned its legitimacy by being a reliable and efficient system for producing things that work. Too often, we forget that. Sometimes those working things are gadgets and sometimes they are ideas, but the cool outputs are why we like science. And why we should like it. The facts that you didn’t die of some ghastly childhood disease, that you live in a society where people are literate, that you can drink and bathe in clean, temperature-controlled water — these are just a few of the fruits of science.

When Diederik Stapel selfishly undercuts science’s public reputation, his doing so doesn’t threaten mass illiteracy or take a wrecking ball to your municipal water system. What it does is give verbal ammunition to the crowd who claims that “science is just one way of viewing the world.”

These folks just love to hear the story of Stapel. After all, if a respected scientist is just making stuff up, why is the stuff that my side makes up any less awesome?

This argument has its logical problems, but it also gets converts. That’s what makes Stapel a scumbag in the vein of Abdul Qadeer Khan. By weakening public respect for science, he reduces public funding for research. He makes the study of science less attractive for talented students. He clutters up the agenda of working scientists who have to spend time justifying their approach rather than building us a better future.

Is needlessly delaying future scientific breakthroughs evil?

Given everything that science does for us — both life-saving and life-improving technologies — I think the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks the answer is “no.”

PS: Check out Smart Drug Smarts Episode #186: The Replication Crisis with Dr. Rolf Zwaan and hear how science is working to self-correct its systems to improve accuracy and accountability.

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Will the real Evil Scientist please stand up? was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all seen an X-Files re-run at some point. Some of us grew up on it, like a weird sort of mother’s milk steeped in the pervasive idea that all is not what it seems and that institutions are — almost by definition — not to be trusted.

“Trust no one” was the catch-phrase for the series and the personal motto of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny), the slightly more conspiracy-prone of the show’s two lead characters.

“Trust no one” was catchy, and it made for good paranoic entertainment — but it left something out.

A word.

Else.

Because really, what Agent Mulder was saying in his haunted, emphatic murmurs was: “Trust no one else.”

It was assumed that he could trust himself — and presumably also his partner-in-paranoia, Agent Scully. Such implicit trust lies at the heart of good partnerships.

But this is not good science.

Popular Science, Minus the Science.

You’ve probably seen some of those translation tragicomedy emails where sentences have been translated from English to French to Russian and then back to English again — often with hilarious consequences that make international violence seem surprisingly rare, given the capacity for misunderstanding.

(I like the possibly-apocryphal warning on a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, which probably should have said “Men Only.” Instead: “It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man.”)

Science is often the same way. The common language of the academician or the professional researcher is not the way regular people talk. The formal grammar and spelling might be the same, but often the similarities end there. Scientific papers come rich in a jargon, format, and style ready-made to intimidate non-specialists and provide a virtual force-field against the general public.

A scientific paper submitted to a scholarly journal written at an eighth-grade reading level — the target at which most mass-market American newspapers aim — would be rejected faster than you can say Nullius in verba.*

Luckily, we’ve got science journalists.

I view science journalists —a group of which I would count myself one — as being something akin to cultural matchmakers. We’re here to convince the dubious, mercurial public that the dour-seeming, standoffish scientist who talks funny (and who is clearly no fun at parties) is actually perfect for them… If they’d just give him a chance on a couple of dates.

As in romantic matchmaking, this requires putting the benefits that each party offers into terms the other party can understand. There is an element of translation.

And while ideas may not always be lost in translation…they are almost always given a long leash.

This slightly tweaked, mass-palatable version of scientific findings is commonly known as “Popular Science.” There’s even a magazine that goes by this same name, founded in 1872 and still active today.

However, one of the nice things about the peer-reviewed journals that constitute the official body of established scientific knowledge is that (this is the theory, anyway…) things that wind up published are first credibility-checked by colleagues committed to the principles of scientific rigor and skepticism, and at least passably familiar with the current consensus views within that particular domain.

“Popular Science” journalism, on the other hand…

Hell, we’ll take anybody with half-decent spelling who’s old enough to legally buy silly-putty.

And unfortunately, many of the “science stories” that make it to the general public are severely skewed by the journalist community’s somewhat laxer credentials.

The First Principle.

Scientists are people too.

In fact, too is probably not putting a fine enough point on it.

Scientists are people first, and scientists second.

Professed allegiances aside, all of us start out as standard-issue Homo Sapiens infants, and those that go on to scientific research endeavors require both training and vigilance to stand guard against the natural inclinations that make us unscientific.

Many of you will be familiar with the work of scientist and author Daniel Ariely. Ariely is best known for his book Predictably Irrational, which details the (frustratingly many) ways in which our brains are built to use “cognitive shortcuts” that guide us to behave in useful ways, though not ways actually grounded in reality. (“Useful,” in this sense, being the useful 50,000 years ago on the Serengeti version of the term — which is not always in sync with usefulness in modern day Hong Kong, Poughkeepsie or Barcelona.)

Richard Feynman was one of the leading physicists of the 20th Century, a contemporary of Einstein, involved with the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bombs, and widely regarded as an outstanding genius in a line of work with enough geniuses in circulation to merit further gradations.

Feynman stated the “Trust No One” problem succinctly:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman

Being one himself, Feynman understood that scientists — like everyone else — each have their own leanings and inclinations. And also, that they enjoy being right.

But trying to prove yourself right is a tricky business. Even the most conscientious scientists are fans of their own biases. And if trial after trial after trial simply confirms a researcher’s initial suspicions, the tendency is to clap one’s hands together and declare victory.

Of course, this is why the Scientific Method enshrines the exact opposite methodology.

The Scientific Method is built around repeated attempts to disprove a hypothesis. Especially if it’s your own hypothesis.

Feynman had it right: “You are the easiest person to fool.”

The Intuitive Appeal of a Walk in the Park.

“Long visits to nature linked to improved mental health, study finds.”

This was the title of an article on my search-results screen, and I was looking for just such an article. I’d heard a lot of second-hand citations of studies tying cognitive health — increased creativity, speed of calculation, relaxation — to exposure to natural environments. I wanted to know more.

I only got three paragraphs into the article before I stopped, my skepticism-alarm buzzing.

The slippery slope of bad logic seemed surprisingly slippery.

I want to look now at the first three paragraphs in their entirety, to see if you smell the same logic-rat I did. Here they are:

People who visit parks for 30 minutes or more each week are much less likely to have high blood pressure or poor mental health than those who don’t, according to new research by Australian and UK environmental scientists.

A study led by The University of Queensland (UQ) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) suggests people might need a minimum “dose of nature”.

UQ CEED researcher Dr Danielle Shanahan said parks offered health benefits including reduced risks of developing heart disease, stress, anxiety and depression.

[The full article is here.]

Paragraph 1 gets it right. It talks about a pattern in the numbers between people who visit parks, and those people’s health.

Paragraph 2 slips just a little bit — not unforgivably, but we can sense where it’s going. The study “suggests that people might…” The article hasn’t actually gotten anything wrong yet, because both suggestions and might-ness are soft terms. It might…but then again, it might not. By definition, this statement can’t be wrong.

But in Paragraph 3, the other shoe drops: “…parks offered health benefits…” Here the equivocation goes away. There’s not a “maybe” in sight. What was merely an identified relationship in Paragraph 1 has suddenly morphed into a cause-and-effect statement.

And it took only 88 words to do it.

C+C Confusion Factory

The difference between Correlation and Causality is one of the most important distinctions to understand — not just in science, but in logic.

And not just in formal logic, but in “walking around the world” logic.

The classic example features ice cream cones and shark attacks.

Every year in the northern hemisphere, there is a rise in shark attacks that marches in statistical lockstep with the increasing sales of ice cream cones. Why? Because ice cream sales spike during summer. And this is also when people go to the beach on vacation, and thus become convenient targets for the local shark.

We all know that walking down the street with an ice cream cone doesn’t make you the likely victim of a shark attack, any more than an attacking shark is likely to offer you ice cream as a mea culpa.

The correlation does not imply any causality.

Any science journalist needs to understand this difference.

Now it would be fair to point out that what this article’s third paragraph actually says is “UC CEED researcher Dr. Danielle Shanahan said…” [emphasis mine]. And very possibly, the journalist was completely correct, merely quoting a scientist who was confusing causality with correlation.

Indeed, this could be the case. Because Paragraph 4 is a direct quote from the same doctor:

“If everyone visited their local parks for half an hour each week, there would be seven percent fewer cases of depression and nine percent fewer cases of high blood pressure,” she said.

This was the point where I could not control my skepticism, and I went looking for the actual study. (You can see it here.)

As I suspected, the study was purely correlational.

It was based on self-reported data collected from a reasonable sample size of Brisbane-resident Australians, who had taken a survey. The researchers normalized the resulting data, compensating for factors known to impact health — things like socioeconomic status, number of days worked per week, and the presence of children under 16 present in the home.

Still, I can think of a ton of potential invisible causal variables — things to fill the role of summertime in the ice-cream-and-sharks example — that could reasonably allow the factual statement in Paragraph 1 to be true while making the causal claims in Paragraphs 3 and 4 completely false.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a part of some nefarious anti-parks lobby, and I love green spaces and nature as much as the next guy — possibly more than the next guy.

But that’s exactly it.

I suspect that the researchers love city parks and green spaces too, and that they were trying to prove their own hypothesis, not disprove it.

In their scientific paper — the sort of thing the public never reads — the authors were appropriately circumspect, and didn’t step beyond what they could prove:

“…our results show nature experiences, if causal in nature, could simultaneously lead to a suite of health benefits…”

Note the “if” and the “could” — as opposed to the conspicuously-absent “do.”

But in the “Popular Science” adaptation of their research, that nuance is lost. The public is presented with hoped-for possibilities as if they are established facts. And bear in mind, we’re talking about the small subset of the public that actually seeks out and reads “science journalism”. A few more word-of-mouth garblings, and who knows how a story like this winds up being understood?

I’ll be the first to admit: in the context of public parks and people walking in nature, a slip-up like this has a pretty limited downside. It’s hard to imagine a true disaster scenario from overspending public dollars on greenery.

But the same can’t be said of all scientific studies. Gross historical screw-ups from phrenology to forced sterilizations to pre-frontal lobotomies could all have been drastically reduced or even nipped in the bud if science journalists of the time had done a better job delivering the public the unvarnished facts.

Want to hear the real irony in all of this?

Providing the public with good information is only correlated with the public making smart decisions. It is not causal. (And sadly, history provides plenty of evidence for this.)

Now go take a nice, long walk in the park.

Not because it’s healthy for you. But because it might be.

* Nullius in verba is the slogan of the British Royal Society, a scientific group founded in 1660 and active to this day. Translated in English, the phrase is “Take nobody’s word for it.”

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Roy Walford was a medical doctor in the mid-20th century, and a major proponent of Caloric Restriction — a lifestyle of intentional, fairly extreme under-feeding, for the purpose of living longer.

A friend once said of him:

“The way Roy eats, he may not live any longer, but it sure will feel like it.”

Caloric Restriction and Fasting are not the same thing. Fasting is a temporary-but-total halt to eating any calories. Caloric Restriction is eating significantly less calories than a person normally would, forever.

And yet, Walford’s friend’s joke works in both cases.

This week, I’m undergoing my second week-long water fast. A “water fast” is just what it sounds like: A time between meals when you’re only allowed to drink water.

In this case, the time between meals is 168 hours.

Admittedly, this is a while.

But here I am, almost 5 days into the fast at the time of this writing, and I’m getting along just fine. My brain is working well; I’m in a good mood; and although my stomach was growling earlier, it hasn’t made a peep in hours.

(Typically I find that my stomach voices its concerns about once a day, for just a few minutes, and pretty severely. Then it goes away to sulk until tomorrow, once it realizes I’m not paying any attention.)

Prior to my first week-long water fast (February of 2015), the longest that I’d ever gone without food was probably 18 hours, tops. But then, prior to my first 3000-mile bicycle ride, the furthest single ride I’d ever taken my bike on was probably 20 miles, tops. So I’m comfortable with the idea that what we are used to doing is often nowhere near the limits of our abilities.

But why go a week without food?

Well funny you should ask.

In November of 2014, I spoke with Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a leading oncologist and father of what is now called the “Metabolic Theory of Cancer.” Without going off into the scientific weeds, the gist is that there are many, if not most, types of cancer that can’t hack it in a low-blood-sugar environment.

While your healthy cells can nibble on your body’s fat stores for fuel during starvation (and to be brutally honest, that’s what a water fast is: temporary, voluntary starvation), cancer cells can’t draw power from fats. Some studies even indicate that the breakdown compounds from fat might be directly harmful to cancer.

Long story short, by turning your into body a sugar-free environment and living on stored fat tissues for a few days, any stray cancer cells that might be lurking inside you starve to death, while the rest of your body carries on with comparative gusto. This is a cartoonish oversimplification, but it gets the idea across. Days 1–3 of the water fast drain your body’s sugar supply to near zero, and Days 4–7 you wait for your next meal (the Day 8 “re-feeding”), knowing that any cancer baddies are starving to death, while you’re merely starving.

So the idea behind the fast was — and is — that this might be an effective preventative measure against developing a cancer. As I understand it, at any given time among our body’s billions of cells, we each have hundreds or thousands of random little cancer cells that haven’t gotten their acts together to form a tumor, begin multiplying, and become dangerous.

Doing a fast like this is basically an extermination measure, like my mom does in the garden with weeds. She knows that eventually the weeds will come back. But as long as she does a violent eradication every now and then, they’ll never take over.

So that was the primary rationale for my first week-long fast, when I did it last year. But what I learned from doing it was there are a ton of secondary benefits, most of which I didn’t see coming.

However, rather than re-list those, I’ll direct you to an earlier post I wrote about that experience, which you can see here.

For this post, I’d like to add some how-to thoughts on fasting that I’ve picked up this year — blessed as I now am with the wisdom of two whole rounds of experience. (Yes, that’s a joke.)

#1 - The ideal spot for fasting is somewhere out-of-town, not staying with relatives.

I’m pretty convinced of the merits of this rule, despite the fact that it’s something I stumbled onto by pure happenstance — or more accurately, my girlfriend pointing out that we’re overdue for a vacation.

I ate my “last meal” (more of an extended, buffet-style smorgasbord, but we’ll call it a “meal” for the sake of my dignity), ending at 11:59pm on Saturday night of this past week.

At 6:30am, we got into a cab and ultimately wound up at the beach, 5 hours out of town. So the first 5 days / 4 nights of my fast were spent at an all-inclusive beachside resort.

Now before this sounds like bragging, let me remove the luster from that last paragraph by stating that by the end of the first 36 hours, I had a brutal sunburn (pure stupidity to blame) and about 50 bites from some biting insect that apparently ignored everyone except me.

But with all that said, getting into an unfamiliar environment was amazing for the “fasting psychology” because — I’m going to highligh this so you know I’m serious:

The most grievously awful thing about fasting is the expectation of meals that you don’t get.

No, it’s not hunger. Hunger is child’s play. What sucks is the crushed expectations of having done your work, or survived until noon, or whatever Pavlovian trigger normally tells you “Good job buddy, now it’s meal-time!” — and then not getting to have a meal.

By putting yourself in an unfamiliar location, all those familiar expectations like “I eat lunch at noon” or even “I eat at all” are blissfully missing. You’ll still be hungry, sure. But the feeling of your expectations betrayed won’t be there.

Why do I mention the “not staying with relatives” as part of my vacation prescription? It’s probably obvious.

Relatives eat. And relatives are used to eating with us, taking us out to eat, and showing us how well they cook. Plus, we’ve all got that one relative who we suspect is secretly in a Fantasy Fat-ball League, competing with other graying moms to see how many pounds they can add to their adult children.

So stay away from all that.

#2 - Keep your fasting on a need-to-know basis.

Surprise, surprise: Some people are just going to have nothing positive to say once you step outside the well-worn ruts of civil society.

And few things are more universal than regular, voluntary eating.

One of the people fasting with me this year — who had previously completed a 7-day fast, so this was no rookie — was belittled out of completing the fast when she made the mistake of telling her mom she hadn’t eaten in four days.

The reasons for people’s reactions is normally a legitimate, genuine concern that you may be doing something that will inadvertently hurt yourself. But that doesn’t mean these people’s opinions are productive, medically well-informed, or non-hysterical.

So consider your audience very carefully before mentioning that you’re not eating. If you do mention it, make it clear that your goals have nothing to do with weight loss. (Weight loss while fasting will inevitably occur — mostly water weight that will return quickly on re-feeding — but a zero-calorie fast is not a diet, and not the right way to approach any long-term weight loss goals.)

Secrecy aside, the people who do need to know about your fast are the people you live with, and possibly your doctor. The people you live with — if you give them fair warning — will probably be helpful in keeping the kitchen clear of your very favorite foods, which will be an unwelcome temptation. They might also be willing to eat a few more meals outside the house during your fast-week, if the thought of watching other people eating while you starve is too much for you to handle.

And if you have any ongoing medical conditions, it would be advisable to consult with your doctor before fasting, to see if he or she has any concerns.

That said, both of my fasts have been done outside any medical supervision, and that hasn’t been an issue. The great thing about fasting (as opposed to starvation) is that the moment you decide that you’ve had enough, you’re only moments away from consumable calories.

Both times I’ve fasted, I’ve done it with groups of people (members of the Smart Drug Smarts listening audience), and many have dropped out part-way through, because something “just didn’t feel right.” The somethings have varied pretty widely — ranging from headaches to heart palpitations to brain fog — but within a couple hours of eating, they have (in all cases that I’m aware of) felt substantially improved.

#3 - A Fast is Vacation-Aid for People Who Can’t Vacation.

This won’t apply to everyone.

If you’re one of those people who can switch off your work-brain on Friday afternoon and not reboot it until Monday at the strike of the alarm bell, I envy you. But that ain’t me. I dress and act casually, but I’m a card-carrying workaholic and punch my clock 7 days a week. I take my laptop with me when my girlfriend wants to “get away for the weekend,” and I secretly harvest alone-time so I can work more, like an alcoholic hiding fifths of vodka in the laundry room.

But here’s the thing about fasting: You’ve gotta take it easy. By the time you’re a few days in, you don’t have much choice.

Physically, this probably seems obvious. But if you haven’t fasted, the energy depletion may not be as you imagine. It’s not like you’ve got the flu and getting out of bed is a challenge. It’s just like you don’t have your high gears any more.

During this fast, I’ve taken multi-mile walks and I can bang out 100 jumping jacks and ride my bike across town — but I wouldn’t want to run wind-sprints or do anything requiring maximal exertion. My mind just rebels at the thought of going all-out. (And my body would too; try giving your physical all by 3–4 days into a fast and you’ll find that you tire out very quickly compared to what you’re used to.)

But what does all of this have to do with workaholics vacationing?

I’m speaking mostly from my own experience here, but this jives with others whom I’ve spoken with. A selection bias may be cooked-in, but here goes…

A starving brain is a reflective brain.

What do I mean by this?

First, let’s do a little conjectural thinking based in Evolutionary Psychology. (i.e. “Would our feelings about a modern situation have made any sense were we living in an African tribe 200,000 years ago?”)

For most of us workaholic types, we are go-go-go. Execute, execute, execute. Look for next to-do and execute on that too. Ad infinitum. Back in the Paleolithic era, this would have been a relatively limited pinwheel of hunt-gather-procreate-hunt-gather-procreate. Nowadays our to-do lists have more variety.

In a starvation situation, the hunt-gather portion of the pinwheel gains in immediate importance, and your attention to your to-do list increases. Try harder! You need food!

But after 72 hours of failure to eat, something starts to change. Trying hard has failed. Executing on the to-do list has not produced results. If we’re to survive, what we need is not re-committing our diminishing resources to an execution plan that has failed. We need broad, creative, expansive thinking to come up with something new if we’re going to get out of this jam.

That’s my theory — maybe right, maybe wrong — on why the back-half of a week long fast really lends itself to far-ranging, reflective, creative thinking. This is the sort of thinking our ancestors would have needed to save their own lives. But for us, because our physical deprivation is self-inflicted, we get the benefit of this rare, enjoyable mind-state and the ability to apply it to thoughts other than where will my next calorie come from?

Reading books, long conversations, daydreaming, rolling ideas over in your head… These are the sorts of things people are “supposed” to do to relax, right? And they’re the type workaholics have a problem finding time for. Fasting doesn’t find you the time, but it gives you the inclination. And if you don’t fight it, the time takes care of itself.

So is fasting a health thing, or a mind thing, or both?

If you’d asked me before I did my first fast, I would have unequivocally said “a health thing.” But now I’m on the fence.

Or rather, I think there is no fence.

The Body-Mind Division is probably one of the least helpful ideas that Western civilization ever came up with — and it’s surprising it has stuck around so resolutely, seeing how whacking anybody in the head with a solid stick can quickly call into question the theory’s basic tenets.

But as everything from yoga to golf to jiu-jitsu to Navy SEAL training will readily attest… advancement in a physical skill is predicated on increasing measures of mental self-control. And that feedback loop can go the other way too.

In the case of fasting, the mental willpower to force one’s self to go without food for a week can in turn cause physical changes that can (among other things: cancer prevention, immune-system restoration) prime the mind for fresh thinking and new realizations. And so the circle continues.

There are 52 weeks in a year. Can you think of a more interesting way to cut 2% off your annual grocery bill?

Want More Info on Specific Water Fasting How-To’s? Click here for brass-tacks, consolidated information and recommendations.

PS: Fasts shorter than a week can still offer significant benefits, although different from those discussed above. “Intermittent Fasting” (IF) is one popular protocol used by people who eat every day, but in a tight “feeding window” of hours, e.g. 2pm — 9pm only.

One Final PS: Nothing has ever tasted so good as your first bite of your first meal, post-fast. For me this time, it was salmon curry — which my girlfriend sent me this photo of a few hours before my 168-hour mark. Those last few hours were long ones indeed.

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Water Fasting: Like starving, only better. was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There were ominous tidings in my Twitter stream yesterday…

@Lawlerpalooza You jumped the shark with today’s episode on smartdrugsmarts. Not sure if I can trust your podcast when you do woo woo science

He was right to be upset.

My podcast, published yesterday, was bullshit of the worst sort.

It featured actors passing themselves off as legitimate authorities — in one case, as a reputable surgeon stacked with Oxford credentials. They talked about a revolutionary miracle cure that was total, unadulterated baloney.

My listener was right to call me out. In fact, his tweet was not half as bad as I deserved.

Except that yesterday was April Fools’ Day.

“Jumping the Shark”: An idiom describing the moment when a TV show or other series begins to decline in quality. The phrase is based on a scene from the sitcom “Happy Days,” when the character Fonzie jumps over a shark on water-skis.

When (and how) is it okay to bullshit people?

This is a question devoid of easy answers. It may place right up there with “What is consciousness?” and “Why is there a universe in the first place?”

We all know that lying is wrong…

But we also all know that there’s loopholes to this general rule. One loophole is for things that are funny. And that loophole gets wider the funnier those things are.

This rationalization is garden variety utilitarianism. (At least, I think it is— I’d need to consult a real philosopher to confirm this.) But things get dicey when a guy like me has to guess how funny something will be for all involved.

Ask any comedian and you’ll get confirmation: Jokes bomb sometimes.

You never know if what seems funny in your head is going to be funny for the next guy. Or a roomful of next guys. Or an Internet audience full of thousands of next guys.

Until you present the joke, that is.

Drum roll please…

Lie to me — but maybe only sometimes.

I’m a sucker for a prank.

Different folks gravitate towards different styles of humor.

Personally, I’m underwhelmed by fart jokes. But I can’t get enough of pies-in-the-face and the sort of humor that combines playfulness and audacity. I think the guy who did the fake sign-language eulogy for Nelson Mandela should win some sort of Nobel Prize for Humor.

But that’s just me. Whether or not my podcast’s listeners (or a reasonable percentage of them) will agree with what I think is funny is anyone’s guess.

You just can’t know in advance. And you can’t ask, either. The whole point of tricking someone requires that they don’t know a trick is coming.

My show is about how to get smarter — using the latest techniques from neuroscience, applied to your very own brain. It’s a subject where credibility is a cardinal virtue.

Putting out bad data has consequences that range from wasting someone’s time and money (e.g. they buy a supplement or a gizmo that doesn’t work) to actually hurting someone (we’re talking about applied neuroscience — do you have a spare brain?).

The First Big Science Prank I Can Remember: Discover Magazine, circa 1995 — a brilliant hoax about “naked ice borers.”

When my audience tunes in, they’re trusting what they hear to be as true as the current state of biomedical research allows. Which actually means they that will hear some amazing claims…

• Nicotine, minus the tobacco, has actually got a lot going for it.
• Somewhere, right now, unlicensed macaque monkeys are driving electric wheelchairs using only their brain waves (motivated by fresh grapes).
• There is a natural, reliable mood-enhancer that has been used safely for over two millenia and tastes good in tea.

Damn if we aren’t rooting for all of this stuff to be true.

Who wouldn’t like to live in a candy-colored near future with Alzheimer’s eradicated, depression biochemically inverted and your average 3rd grader smart enough to beat today’s Jeopardy winners without straining their cute li’l neurons?

But while everyone would like to be an optimist, no one wants to think that they’re fooling themselves. And so the dirtiest word in my audience’s entire lexicon is…

(I shudder as I type this…)

Woo-woo.

Okay, so maybe that’s two words.

Or maybe not?

“Woo-woo,” like the dubious practices that it denotes, defies strict verification even in attributes as basic as proper spelling. And this is appropriate. If woo-woo were the unmistakeable bullshit we suspect it is, then we would just call it bullshit.

Instead, woo-woo hangs on by a ligament of non-falsifiability, of supportive anecdotes, or a lack of persuasively-damning test data — allowing it to stave off universal condemnation and harbor a hopeful band of credulous devotees. Woo-woo is the purgatory where silliness waits before being cast into the hellfire of Total Bullshit.

My April Fools’ joke was a podcast episode featuring the best/worst sort of woo-woo pseudoscience: an interview with a (fake) doctor who could perform a “chakra transplant.” (Chakras are mystic energy-balls located like prayer beads up and down the human spine. I can’t prove that you don’t have them, but you can’t prove that you do; classic woo-woo.)

Fun Fact: Within three hours of posting the episode, we ranked #2 in Google for “chakra transplant.” I was both elated at Google’s speed and bemused that I wasn’t the first person to make up the idea of transplanting a chakra.

I couldn’t claim surprise when some people were pissed.

From another listener:

“To say that a podcast that I admire and enjoy has now decided to dive into the world of complete unscientific witchcraft is disappointing…. Well let’s say I had to read the description 3 times and still didn’t believe it.”

Nerves of Steel, or Brain of Cinderblock?

Within the office, we knew that we’d alienate some people, who wouldn’t get the joke… But it was a calculated risk. We hoped the people who thought it was funny would outnumber those who would be turned off and never come back.

At least part of the gamble seems to have worked: We did get a lot of downloads. April 1st was our single biggest download-day in the past month, overshadowing its closest rival by about 50%.

But more ominously, I remain a believer in Richard Nixon’s idea of a “great, silent majority.” For every hoodwinked listener who was disgusted enough to email me his contempt (all of whom responded well to my “April Fools’!” reply) I fear there were 99 others who left silently out the back door, without leaving a digital Dear John note.

Of course, I won’t know for sure until I see the downloads for next week’s show. But whatever their number, I mourn the listener-relationships I had to sacrifice on the altar of humor. But it’s only once per year the calendar grants us a “Get Out of Bullshit Free” card. I really had no choice.

At the same time, I get nervous thinking ahead to next year — and just how far I’ll have to go to pull off an April Fools’ prank now that everybody knows what a reprobate I am.

From Twitter, 18 hours later:

@Lawlerpalooza LOL love your podcast. You got me. Keep up the good work.

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But it was only a FAKE shark I jumped! was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that my version of a color — as experienced by me, in my head — might be different than someone else’s.

And not in the sense that one of us is color-blind and has less ability to distinguish between hues. What about two people with equivalent ability to distinctly perceive areas of the color spectrum?

How can we be sure that the shamrock green experienced by one person isn’t perceived by someone else — after having been processed by their retinal cells, transmitted via the optic nerve to their visual cortex, etc — as some perceptually different color? Say, as periwinkle blue.

How would we ever know?

Of course, in the end, we can’t know.

This final domain of inner experience is measurable only insofar as it is reportable. I can pick shamrock green out of a color line-up. (“It was the leprechaun who robbed me, officer.”) But language falls flat when it comes to defining the real internal experience. How can I ever clearly describe shamrock green without using the word green?

Even if I got tricky and said “It’s the color across the color wheel from red,” this doesn’t resolve the irksome possibility that maybe someone else’s inner experience has the perceptual color wheel rotated by a fixed amount.

Maybe my green is their blue, my red is their orange, and so on.

Our intuition is probably (?) correct.

“Common sense” tells us that we’re all equipped with similar biological hardware. We’re trained by similar parents and societies to interpret similar external stimuli…

So why wouldn’t our inner experiences be equally similar?

Well, they should be. Right?

But here’s the annoying thing.

We only have one data point, when you get down to it. We have our own internal experience.

Everything else is a plausible-sounding hunch.

Try as you might, you can never really know that your sweetheart’s deep green eyes aren’t what everyone else sees as dog-vomit yellow. Or that her soprano voice doesn’t perceptually register with everyone else as a husky baritone.

In an era when we’re increasingly concerned about the NSA peeling back the defenses on the last of our secrets, it’s ironic that in the most personal realms of our experience, everything is a secret, whether we want it to be or not.

Short of using circular definitions straight out of Alice in Wonderland, I can never tell you what “my blue” looks like and know that the true meaning has successfully jumped the chasm between us.

But while we can’t reliably report our perceptions…

…we’re increasingly able to change them. And even to extend them.

2000 years ago if you wanted to change someone’s vision, you could gouge out his eyes. While useful in certain contexts, this is a unidirectional change in his perceptual abilities, and unlikely to earn you any favors.

200 years ago rudimentary biohacking had invented spectacles, monocles, and magnifying glasses, telescopes and microscopes. The scale and the warp of light we could bring to the retina was changing — allowing major quality-of-life improvements in those with access to these technologies. (These included inventors like Ben Franklin, father of bifocal lenses, and not one willing to forego reading due to biological farsightedness.)

20 years ago our ability to extend vision had grown manifold. Spy satellites, electron microscopes, inexpensive contact lenses, and all manner of video media allowed us to store, transmit, manipulate and review images. Steven Spielberg gave us photorealistic brachiosaurs in Jurassic Park, and the Hubble Telescope gave us super-squint precision into the far reaches of distant galaxies.

2 years ago the first human patients were sporting retinal implants — digital technology receiving light and directly stimulating optic nerves to bridge the communication gaps that cause certain kinds of congenital blindness. In some cases, however imperfectly, modern technology was helping the blind to see.

2 or 20 years from now? We might have unlocked the secret to sharing our personal perceptions.

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This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.

The Colors I See Are Secret was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The most famous understatement of recent times probably comes from the Apollo 13 space flight: “Houston, we have a problem.” (The actual quote by astronaut James Lovell was “Houston, we’ve had a problem” — but the Tom Hanks movie cemented it in our cultural memory in the present tense.)

Far lesser-known, my personal all-time favorite understatement comes from the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, in his first-ever radio address to his people following the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hirohito said: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Later in the address, a subordinate got to the point and mentioned, “And oh yeah, we’ve unconditionally surrendered.” That was the fine print that Hirohito just couldn’t say while still sounding sufficiently imperial.

Understatement has its place.

Sometimes maintaining a low profile is important.

(Australians have a saying about “tall poppies” — which is basically the lawn-mowing version of the Icarus myth. The “tall poppy” flower is the first one to get lopped off by the lawnmower, or the scythe, or whatever.)

Scientists studying psychedelics have good reason to value understatement.

They’re dealing with some of the most potent psychoactive compounds known to man — substances that have been branded “Schedule I” drugs by the US Food & Drug Administration (and parallel groups in many other countries). This classification translates to “high potential for abuse, no recognized medical or therapeutic use, no way, no how.”

It’s basically the Scarlet Letter of organic chemistry.

And this despite the acknowledged fact that the effects of these compounds — whether “medicinal” or not — can be screamingly profound. A 2006 study at Johns Hopkins University on the physiological effects of psilocybin on volunteers (psilocybin is the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms) produced, shall we say, some mild cognitive effects as well.

(Can you spot the understatement in the above paragraph?)

Over 50% of the experiment’s participants reported profound “mystical experiences” after taking the psilocybin.

Just what is a mystical experience, you might ask?

Actually, I did ask.

When I interviewed Dr. Frederick Streeter Barrett, from Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, and asked just that question, he replied without missing a beat: “We have a questionnaire for that.”

And that’s one of the paradoxes of the scientific study of psychedelics. Some of the most interesting effects need to be down-converted from the subjective, irrational, and (dare I say it?) spiritual realms into results that can be measured, quantified, and statistically analyzed.

Here’s a statistic that’s hard to understate: Of the experimental participants who had mystical experiences, when asked to reflect back on them many months later, most described their psilocybin-induced “trip” as being among the most personally meaningful experiences in their entire lives.

Now stop and think about for a moment.

There is a pill that, if swallowed, gives you better-than-even odds of having one of the Top 5 most meaningful experiences of your entire life.

(Even when I write it with no exclamation points or flashing red letters, that research-backed statement just sounds like crazy-talk.)

It’s not all sunshine and moonbeams.

That 2006 study’s results do sound amazing. But it’s important to remember that meaningful does not necessarily imply pleasant.

“Bad trips” — which the Hopkins researchers are trying to re-brand as “challenging experiences” — are famously unpleasant, although both terms vastly understate the psychological horror they describe. Despite psilocybin’s having been in use longer than humans have had written language, there is still no sure-fire method to guarantee a user has a “good trip” and not a “bad trip.”

But clearly, something extremely psychologically potent is happening here. So it’s unsurprising that researchers are wondering if — properly harnessed — psychedelics can offer novel solutions for psychological illnesses.

And luckily, after decades of prohibition that extended even to research on these compounds, the pendulum is starting to swing. The data are starting to be gathered. The results are starting to come in.

And the results look promising.

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This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.

Everyone appreciates a good understatement. was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you ever stopped to gawk at some strange dog breed, wondering “How the heck did those things survive in the wild?”

Then you may remember that for modern dog breeds, human civilization actually is “the wild.”

I find myself wondering about this a lot. Where do pets fit in the modern urban ecosystem? For example, could chihuahuas be considered parasites? Do they offer something to their owners to counterbalance their cost in pet food, plus the dim annoyance they seem to universally cause non-chihuahua owners?

(I have much more positive feelings for less inbred dog breeds — those that seem like they could hack it in the wild without human providers.)

But maybe my thinking here is screwy. After all, could I hack it in the wild?

Is the ability to go feral a legitimate requirement for respect as a species?

I’m starting to think not.

I’ve recently been reading a book called Domesticated. It’s an evolutionary history of domesticated animals, covering better-known stories like “wolves turning into dogs” and less familiar transitions like “aurochs turning into cows.” (You don’t know what an auroch is? Don’t feel bad; they’re extinct. But only recently.)

I’m not finished with the book yet, but already it has held more than a few surprises:

1. How large the number of domesticated animal species is, and how linked they’ve been with the ascendance of humans to Species Numero Uno on Earth. Humans and dogs aren’t quite as vital to each other as bees are to flowering plants…but there’s an analogy to be made. (Don’t believe me? Ask the people who go to dog parks to scout for romantic partners.)
2. Despite a long history of domestication, most domestic species maintain quite a bit of kissin’-cousin cross-breeding with wild populations. This means the gene population fine-tuned for human purposes gets re-sprinkled with wildness every now and then. And vice-versa. Domesticated animals who “go feral” add civilization-optimized genetic signatures into wild populations.
3. Only in the past 150 years or so have domesticated animals been rigorously, proactively bred to “push” certain traits — and had their breeding controlled to prevent the “leaking in” of wild counterpart genes. A lot of this has happened since the advent of dog shows, horse shows, and similar competitions. The Result: Many of the most “exotic” breeds of domestic animals are brand spankin’ new from an evolutionary perspective. (This seems to make “exotic” a misleading word, implying these breeds are from somewhere geographically distinct. In fact, they’re just new inventions.)

For domesticated animals, this has worked out extremely well.

Despite the extinction of cow-ancestor aurochs, there are hundreds of millions of cows alive today that wouldn’t be here were it not for their utility to humans. You may not envy cows, but from a rationalist biological perspective, they’re a very successful species.

For animals that are pets, it gets even better.

We no longer expect house cats to carry their weight economically — even though their proto-domesticated ancestors were integrated into human environments precisely because of their usefulness in keeping down rodent populations.

Nowadays, cats are bred for cuteness, for their snug fit in soft human laps, for their propensity to zany antics in YouTube videos.

I’d love to ask philosopher David Pearce what he thinks about this, but it seems to me that we may be breeding pets that “default to happy” more than would ever have happened in the tooth-and-claw natural selection of a wilderness environment. Modern housecats don’t need to be anxiously on guard for predators; they need to enjoy pen-lasers and look cute while stretching in sunbeams.

(Do I sound a little jealous of cats? Actually, yes. But I’m as much of a sucker for them as anyone, and I’ll include a photo as proof.)

But domestication — happening as it did over thousands of animal generations — wasn’t a goal-directed activity. It happened in phases. The first wild cats to stray into human villages didn’t anticipate YouTube stardom. They were there because humans’ grain storage unwittingly created an ideal ecological magnet for furry little mammals who love to eat grain.

You know those sucker-fish that live on the backs of whales, vacuuming off the bacterial scum? Whales are more than willing to put up with them (even if it tickles sometimes). So it was with village-dwelling humans and pre-domestication cats. Cats with the genetic cojones to suppress their fear of us big bipeds had better access to rodent buffets, and soon the “humans don’t scare me” genes began to out-compete other genes in the cat breeding pool.

In other words, long before humans were domesticating cats, cats were domesticating cats.

Humans just happened to open up a new ecological niche — mouse-magnet granaries — that the wild housecat-ancestors could exploit.

Supernormal stimuli

Imagine yourself as a wild cat 9,000 years ago.

You took a wrong turn and found yourself on the outskirts of a human village, when suddenly a couple of big, scary humans are wandering back into the village, cutting off your best escape route.

You high-tail it away, running further into the village, ducking in the shadows to hide in the first place you find…

It turns out to be a primitive grain silo.

Your fuzzy jaw hits the floor. This is a rodent smorgasbord. Mice in droves, bellies stuffed on grain: fat, slow and unsuspecting. You pinch yourself to see if you’re cat-dreaming…But no — this is real.

So you do what any cat would do. You quickly dispatch a few mice — not taking the time to torment them as they die, because you want to kill even more before they scatter. A mousing opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime.

What you’ve just experienced is a supernormal stimulus.

More delectable food, more easily acquired, than your cat brain had any reason to expect would ever happen in a million years. Supernormal stimuli is basically a scientific term for “kid in a candy store” or “winning the freakin’ lottery.”

Stumbling onto repeated access to the same supernormal stimuli, it’s hard not to go a little wild.

But in the cats-mice-granaries example, this going wild is exactly the tendency that would lead cats to eventually go tame…

Now let’s switch species…

An 11-year-old boy living 20,000 years ago had zero reason to expect any sexual interest from the sexiest woman in his tribe.

She was most likely the chief’s woman, someone to fantasize about from afar. Seeing her in flagrante delicto — had the opportunity ever presented itself — would probably have been by sneak-a-peeking through the darkened slats of a yurt and (let’s face it) mostly just getting a view of the chief’s ass.

What wouldn’t have happened to our ancestral 11-year-old is easy access to scores of copulating adults — the most attractive bunch from a dozen tribes in all directions — perfectly lit for viewing in crystal clarity, all more than happy to have him watch.

This too (like the cat in mouse-heaven) counts as a supernormal stimulus.

And like the wild cat stupefied by his good fortune, so are modern human kids by today’s Internet.

The unfathomable sea of digital sex-signals is more than our brains were evolved to handle.

(I had a friend tell me back in 1996, “I’ve seen all the porn on the Internet.” He was lying then, and that was 20 years ago.)

Supernormal stimuli — when they’re not short-lived flukes — can lead to strange no-man’s-lands of evolutionary divergence. The cats who braved human villages to gain access to rodent smorgasbords also had to deal with dogs (who were domesticated first, it turns out).

Novel opportunities often hide unforeseen problems.

So it is with high-bandwidth porn. In an almost textbook example of too much of a good thing, today’s “digital native” generation is growing up in a new ecosystem where access to sexual rewards is no longer limited by age, social status, physical attractiveness, athletic ability, or even interpersonal social skills. All the checkpoints to on-demand, sex-triggered dopamine release all just disappeared (poof!). In an evolutionary eye-blink.

It should be no surprise there are unforeseen consequences.

And in some cases — no less than a cat stumbling across his first village dog — they can be tragic.

Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain on Porn, has done extensive research on the digital-age epidemic of sexual dysfunction in today’s increasingly at-risk population — i.e. pretty much anyone with an Internet connection.

Especially endangered are teenage boys in their sexually formative years. This is a demographic long famous for sexual fiascos — but erectile dysfunction hasn’t traditionally been among them. Unfortunately, that’s changing.

What’s most surprising is that this probably shouldn’t be surprising.

All the sexual stimulation we want, whenever we want it…

What could possibly go wrong?

Are omnipresent porn and tough-to-impress penises just another step in the self-domestication of Homo Sapiens? Is this only a further decoupling of sexual pleasure from reproductive necessity — like hormonal birth control was a few decades back?

Maaaaybe.

But I can’t help but think of a wild cat, squinting his feline eyes in contempt at a purebred Persian who is content to purr in a human owner’s soft lap.

And I think that evolution has a long way to go before Homo Sapiens women will be equally content with human males whose laps remain soft, despite their best efforts.

If you enjoyed this article, we’d love it if you clicked that little green heart below!

This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.

How to Domesticate a Human Male, or Maybe Why Not To was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Episode #111 of Smart Drug Smarts, I spoke with author Calum Chase about his 2015 book, Surviving AI, which I read late last year and really enjoyed.

I say “enjoyed” in the queasy sense that one enjoys monster movies, as you watch a tracking shot from behind the main character while the music and tension build. You know that something terrifying is about to happen — but it might wind up being freakin’ awesome, despite decent odds your favorite character may also be gruesomely dismembered.

It seems that with Artificial Intelligence — even among the most buttoned-down of academics — you just don’t find a lot of middle-of-the-road opinions. It’s a subject that pulls people into one of a few deeply polarized camps.

The rival camps’ lines of thinking go like this:

• AI will be the greatest thing that has ever happened to humanity; better than Santa Claus being elected President and someone improving on sliced bread all in the same year.
• AI will spell doom with the lethality of a super-virus, only worsened by the fact that it’s happening on purpose and that it’s our own damned fault. (This is pretty much the trifecta of shitty apocalyptic scenarios.)
• True AI will never, ever happen because there’s something fundamentally special about biological brains that will defy computerized replication; AI will give us marvelous telephone operators and self-flying golf carts and such, but will never bridge the gap to the self-aware giving-a-damn-ness at which humans excel.

Each of these outcomes paints the path to a radically different future. A time-traveler jumping 100 years forward would never mistake one of these futures for another. His scorecard would have three simple checkboxes boxes: AI Very Good. AI Very Bad. AI MIA. (Please choose only one.)

From Surviving AI, I didn’t get the sense that there was a rival cadre of experts with a more nuanced opinion. Artificial General Intelligence (the “General” is important, and you can learn more about it here if you want) seems to make everyone an extremist.

And Chase’s book is pretty much an up-to-the-minute, solid overview of current opinion and best guesses by those who really should know.

So it was quite a surprise to read another book just a couple of months later (by another phenomenally smart Briton, David Deutsch) that threw yet another plausible-sounding hat into the prediction-ring. The book in question — and I’m certainly not intending to turn Smart Drug Smarts into a book club, but this is too interesting not to mention — is The Beginning of Infinity.

(Note: don’t let the cover design stop you!)

The Beginning of Infinity, befitting both its theme and title, is actually about multiple infinities — intellectual launch-points in disciplines from astrophysics to political philosophy — and how, in almost every imaginable sense, we ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s a difficult book to synopsize, but the crux goes something like this:

1. There will always be problems.
2. All problems are solvable, given enough knowledge.
3. Knowledge can expand infinitely, given an appropriate appreciation for “good explanations.”

Just about every noun in the sentences above has an exacting definition explored throughout the book, so take my word for it that there’s profundity under the surface. (Also note, though, that the book counsels against taking anyone’s word for anything — including mine.)

Deutsch’s book doesn’t touch deeply on AI, but it does drop an ideological bombshell that I think suggests an actual fourth plank of potential AI-future to the three outlined above.

It goes like this: Any life form that possesses the complementary abilities to a) creatively solve problems, b) codify solutions into knowledge, c) pass on knowledge, and d) re-evaluate the ideas in previously passed-on knowledge (this last one is the kicker) will reach a sort of intellectual “escape velocity” at which there are no theoretical roadblocks to knowing/doing everything possible under the laws of physics.

According to Deutsch, humanity broke through this existential choke-point once and for all during the Enlightenment, after a few false-starts in earlier epochs that didn’t quite make it. (Athens in the time of Socrates and Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent get historical hat-tips.) The fourth criterion — the willingness to continually re-question “established” truths — is kind of the Intellectual Holy Grail in Deutsch’s thesis.

In fact, here’s my five-word synopsis of the book:

“Nothing is sacred” is sacred.

Once this breakthrough idea occurs to a society and gains traction, the society in question — whether this is modern Homo Sapiens, extraterrestrials from Alpha Centauri, or human-manufactured AI — becomes something distinct in the universe: a problem-solving machine.

And this is where Deutsch divides up what really counts in the universe. Not into matter/energy and emptiness. Not into living and non-living. Not into biologic and abiologic. Not into Democrats and Republicans, Sharks and Jets, or anything else. But into problem-solvers and everything else.

As modern (post-Enlightenment) humans, we are already problem-solvers. Our theoretical AGIs will be as well. Aliens we bump into someday might also be. (And if they aren’t, they won’t be terribly interesting to us, after the initial fanfare.)

Here’s where it gets interesting: Silicon-instantiated AGI might be computationally faster than we are, but in Deutsch’s view — and I hope I’m not bastardizing his point, as I try to wedge it down into an email — we and the AGI we invent are, in the most important sense, members of the same species.

We’re both problem-solvers. And if some of us experience the problem “Hey, my biologically-instantiated mind isn’t as fast as I’d like it to be,” we can rest assured that is a problem with a solution that won’t violate the laws of physics. And thanks to the intellectual escape velocity that we’ve already achieved, a solution will be found. (And after it is found, subsequent problems will be discovered. Both problems and their solutions are among Deutsch’s infinities. But he means “problem” in the optimistic “challenge” sense.)

The future is not a zero-sum game. It’s winnable, with an infinitely high score.

And unless we forsake the Enlightenment and backslide into holding things sacred instead of merely respecting good ideas — then we will win. And win fantastically big.

If you’re looking for a hyper-dose of concentrated optimism shrink-wrapped in dense academic rigor, I highly recommend Deutsch’s book.

If you enjoyed this article, we’d love it if you clicked that little green heart below!

This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.

Imagine the best news imaginable. From an astrophysicist. was originally published in Smart Drug Smarts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.