Don't Underestimate The Power Of Cute

Feeling distracted and incapable of focusing on any detail?  Maybe the best thing you can do for yourself is to look at photograph of a cute animal. Researchers at the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences at Hiroshima University discovered that looking at images of puppies and kittens over adult animals caused subjects to focus and increase their ability to concentrate.   The researchers reported their findings in this academic-speak, "This is interpreted as the result of a narrowed attentional focus induced by the

cuteness-triggered positive emotion that is associated with approach motivation and the tendency toward systematic processing. For future applications, cute objects may be used as an emotion elicitor to induce careful behavioral tendencies in specific situations, such as driving and office work."

But as I like to think, I'm not wasting my time on cutestpaw.com.  I'm enabling myself to get down to business.

What's the Secret to Healthy Skin?

If you're anything like me, you've been worrying about your skin for a long time - from the pimples of puberty to the wrinkles, dryness, and droops of age, we obsess about it. It is our biggest organ, and it's right there for everyone to see. Dr. Nina G. Jablonski, the chair of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University, is a scientist who studies skin not from the dermatologist's perspective, but from the evolutionist's - how we went from ape fur to human skin. And she thinks skin is our most underappreciated organ.

When Jablonski was asked about her own skin in a New York Times interview, she said, "I like it. It is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I'm a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the desert sun too long.

"I enjoy watching my skin change because it's one of the few parts of my body that I can watch. We can't view our livers or heart, but this we can."

In her book, "Absolute Beauty," Pratima Raichur, writes that we can live without sight, sound, taste, or smell, and even with only one lung or kidney, but we would die in about five hours without our skin. "A section of skin the size of a quarter contains three million cells, a hundred or more sweat glands, and a yard of blood vessels. Its nerves, blood vessels, and glands carry vital information and nutrients to every other organ, and help to regulate critical bodily functions, including water and temperature control, absorption, secretion, and excretions.

"With more than six hundred forty thousand sensory receptors overall, the skin is in constant communication with the brain, even when we sleep. New research shows that it also plays a key role in the body's immune response...Is it any wonder, then, that the stimulation of this largest of the sensory organs has far-reaching effects on our health and well-being?"

I must say I hadn't quite realized how important it was to keep my skin not only looking good, but healthy. So what is the best way to take good care of our skin?

I find the skin care section of the drugstore aisle overwhelming and confusing these days. I honestly cannot figure out what regimen is best for my skin. Each company promises something different, and I find in my confusion that I mix and match products and probably use too many altogether. According to Raichur, a New York skin care expert trained in the south Asian Ayurvedic tradition (Ayurveda is a science of longevity and immunity whose first aim is to maintain balance and overall well-being), good skin care doesn't mean spending vast sums on the most recent cosmetic fad.

Rather, she suggests that a twice daily gentle cleansing with a few natural ingredients like almond flour, and moisturizing with an essential oil, are all that is required for healthy and supple skin.   This appeals to me. I'm going to learn more about the Ayurvedic approach to healthfulness and I think I'm going to try Raichur's more basic approach to skin care. If it works, I'll let you know.

What I Learned From Giving Up Yoga

My husband and I stumbled into a yoga class in the early 80s, way before it grew into the $6 billion industry it is today. Our instructor held a bi-weekly class for five or 10 of us in the living room of her apartment. She was hands-on and taught us a carefully curated course — a form of Hatha yoga called Iyengar, plus pranayama (the breathing discipline at the heart of yoga) and meditation. The class was transformative for me.

I’d always been athletic, so the physical aspects of yoga were not daunting. It was the mind-emptying, tuning-in parts that felt kind of scary. Although a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I was also a child of a keep-your-nose-to-the-grindstone-don’t-make-waves-do-what’s-expected-of-you kind of Catholic upbringing that made me skitter away from any sort of reflection on my emotional state. Self-reflection was aggressively not part of my family catechism.

It was through yoga in my 20s that I believe I found the courage to flex the muscles – mental, emotional, philosophical – necessary for self-reflection. My yoga practice delivered on its promise — the integration of mind and body — in spades. The quiet focus during the hours of class helped me through the birth of kids, the building (and perpetual renovation) of a marriage, the death of parents and the vagaries of multiple career zigs and zags. But unfortunately along the way things happened that tempered my love affair: My teacher moved out of town, I got old(er) and yoga got popular.

Losing my beloved first teacher was rough. I was never really able adequately to find a teacher who could replicate her intimate, careful, almost parental instruction. The subsequent classes I attended — and there were myriad ones in different studios over the years — were too loosely supervised, too rigidly doctrinaire, or too competitive to suit my needs. And as more and more people started practicing yoga and as the rooms became filled to capacity, it became impossible for a teacher to notice whether or not I was holding a pose correctly, let alone whether it was appropriate for my aging body.

When the Body Starts Saying 'No'

Yet despite not finding a perfect fit, I kept practicing, because I knew how good even a mediocre class made me feel. Until the day, in my mid-40s, when I glanced in the mirror after a particularly rigorous class in which we’d done lots of handstands and headstands, and discovered that multiple blood vessels in my eyes had burst.

I was horrified. And worried. Google was little help — on community boards and yoga discussion sites, the consensus was that broken blood vessels were no big deal, and that the same kind of thing could happen to a person who sneezed too hard. My physician, on the other hand — having recently diagnosed me with high blood pressure — had no trouble connecting the dots. He was concerned that the upside-down poses increased the flow of blood to my head, which in turn increased pressure on the blood vessels in my eyes, which, when coupled with my increasingly inflexible vascular system and the blood-thinning properties of the diuretic that he'd prescribed as my first course of treatment, put me at too great a risk for blood vessels to rupture. He told me to stop doing inversions.

As it turns out, my post-yoga symptoms are not unique. A recent piece in The New York Times Magazine by William Broad, author of the new book, The Science of Yoga, quoted the medical editor of Yoga Journal, Timothy McCall, as saying that the headstand is “too dangerous for general yoga classes." He further elaborated, “the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose).” As a layperson, I have no idea if the injuries McCall was citing could be caused by inexperience, a lack of proper supervision by an instructor, or a lack of knowledge by most instructors and students about our individual diverse health issues and potential drug interactions that make each of us vulnerable, possibly in different was, to injur while holding various yoga postures. But what I do know is that in my 20 years of practice, prior to developing high blood pressure, I had not experienced broken blood vessels in my eves.

The Brain Rebels

So it should have been easy for me to modify what I was doing, right? For those of you who practice yoga, I’m sure you’re imagining how simple it would have been for me to lie flat on my back with my legs up the wall while everyone else was doing handstands. But peer pressure is a powerful force. As pitiful as it sounds — shouldn’t someone who had practiced yoga for decades be more enlightened? — I wasn’t happy being the only person in my large classes who opted for what I considered the sissy pose. Obviously, I have issues with seeming physically weak, but I had loved the feeling of strength I felt when I did my handstands, and it was galling for me to not be able to participate. It felt like an epic fail.

I simply wasn’t emotionally ready to admit that my body was changing. That I was aging. And almost always being the oldest person in my classes, I felt even more vulnerable, exposed, and angry. I wanted to shout out, letting my fellow students know that I’d been doing free-standing handstands before they were born. But instead, I quit yoga.

Maybe I copped out. There’s every reason to believe that I would have benefited from learning to manage my ego in the group classes, and grown emotionally by coming to terms with the limits of my increasingly creaky body. But closing that door opened new ones for me. I’ve continued to explore Eastern mind and body disciplines — learning tai chi and qi gong, and, this past year, working with a teacher trained by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to develop a sustained (finally!) daily meditation practice. I have learned to listen to my body and to be okay with its limitations, and I’ve found new ways to generate physical well-being without risking blood vessels rupturing.

Here are some tips for exploring mind-body awareness:

• Listen to your body. If it hurts, stop. Try not to feel embarrassed by it – we’ve all been there. Sit with the awareness.
• Experiment to find what works for you. If yoga feels too vigorous, speak up and share your concerns with your instructor and, together, devise a practice tailored to your needs. Or explore other disciplines, like some of the less demanding forms of tai chi or qi gong.
• Learn to let go. Clinging rigidly to “what you’ve always done” isn’t healthy. The cliché is true: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
• Embrace change. We are different at different times of our lives and what was perfect at 20 might not be perfect at 50.

Weight, Wait. Don't Tell Me

If you’re like me, you exercise for several reasons: it makes you feel better, it’s good for your cardiovascular system, and it helps you lose or maintain the weight that no matter how virtuous we think we are each additional year seems to lard on. Unfortunately, according to a recent piece in New York magazine, the whole losing weight by exercising thing may not be true. What??? Say it ain’t so.

The author of the piece, Gary Taubes, who wrote the new book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease," says that while the new joint guidelines for physical activity and health published by the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine "suggest that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to promote and maintain health," they pointedly didn’t say that "that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight.

"Indeed, the best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: 'it is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those how have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.'"

Taubes argues that the one thing certain about exercise is that it makes us hungry and so when we burn more calories, we also end up consuming more. The most comprehensive study of the relationship between exercise and weight loss, an analysis in 2000 by two Finnish researchers of data on the subject over the last 20 years, discovered, very discouragingly, that even successful dieters who were trying to maintain weight loss eventually gained it back, regardless of whether or not they exercised.

OK, shoot me now.

Fortunately, Taubes gave me some hope. According to him, "because insulin determines fat accumulation, it’s quite possible that we get fat not because we eat too much or exercise too little but because we secrete too much insulin or because our insulin levels remain elevated far longer that might be ideal."

So what’s that mean in practical terms? George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and an expert in insulin secretion, suggests that the consumption of easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars (like those found in soda pop and potatoes, pasta, rice, donuts and beer) are fattening us up because they spike our insulin levels, which in turn causes our tissues to retain fat.

I get it. If I maintain a more even-keeled level of blood sugar, by eating throughout the day small amounts of protein – cheese, eggs, yogurt - with small amounts of complex carbohydrates – fruits, beans, whole grains - then my insulin levels won’t spike.  And with this new approach, if I balance what I eat with a reasonable amount of exercise, I should be able to maintain my weight.

On the other hand, I confess that my visits to the gym have fallen off sharply since I read this news that exercise won’t by itself keep me trim. In the game of aging and staying fit, there are no silver bullets.

Tears are more than just a wet blanket.

Israeli neurobiologists have discovered that “merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces.” Dr. Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel suggests that tears are a chemical form of language, saying, “basically what we’ve found is the chemo-signaling word for ‘no’ — or at least ‘not now.’ ”

That tears serve a biochemical communication function doesn’t particularly surprise me, but I think their evolutionary role is vastly broader than merely suppressing sexual arousal in men. Psychic tears can also be socially adaptively helpful in a wider array of situations – at work or home -- by communicating submission. Tom Lutz, a University of Iowa professor and author of Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, describes such crying as “the human equivalent of a dog putting its tail between its legs – please, we can say with tears, I am already abased, do me no further harm.”

We know that psychic or emotional tears, because they are exceptional, force us and those around us to acknowledge that something important has just happened – my boyfriend proposed to me, my boss yelled at me, I was deeply moved by a sense of the divine, my dog died – and that we should pause and take a moment for reflection.

Are You Up All Night?

You might think, as I did until the other day, that we need less sleep the older we get. But according to The National Institute of Health, the truth is that older adults actually need as much sleep as young adults - seven to nine hours a night - for optimum health. It's just that it's often harder for older adults to fall and stay asleep. And that's bad for how we age. According the NIH, "Older adults who have poor nighttime sleep are more likely to have a depressed mood, attention and memory problems, excessive daytime sleepiness, more nighttime falls, and use more over-the-counter or prescription sleep aids. Poor sleep is also associated with a poorer quality of life." Yikes!  Staying up to watch Stephen Colbert might be ruining my quality of life?

Scientists are realizing more and more the physical effects of sleep deprivation. It weakens the immune system, preventing the body from being able to ward off infections, as well as affecting the body's chemical balances.

Healthy people start to show marked effects of aging after only a few nights of less than adequate sleep. And in a study done at the University of Chicago, Dr. Eve Van Cauter found that "after four hours of sleep for six consecutive nights, healthy young men had blood test results that nearly matched those of diabetics.

Their ability to process blood sugar was reduced by 30 percent, they had a huge drop in their insulin response, and they had elevated levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, which can lead to hypertension and memory impairment. Such physical effects were unheard of before this study, and as a result, scientists are now looking into connections with lack of sleep and obesity."

Obviously, our national sleeplessness is big business. What is new is just how big. In his upcoming book, "Microtrends," the pollster and worldwide CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, Mark Penn reports the following: "The private sector is leaping on the chance both to help people sleep at night.... The sleeping pill industry is having a field day: The new, nonaddictive Ambien did a record $2 billion worth of business worldwide in 2004, with the number of people aged 20 - 44 who use sleeping pills doubling between 2000 and 2004."

But what is nutty about the growth in the sleep-aid business is the equal growth in the caffeine business. According to Penn,  "From the stay-awake side, caffeine-packed energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector of the nearly $100 billion domestic beverage industry; between 2005 and 2008, those drinks are expected to bring in more profits than all regular soft drinks and sports drinks combined." All soft drinks and sports drinks combined! That is a staggering fact.

There's scarcely a magazine that I read these days that doesn't have a piece listing eight or ten things we can do to get a better night's sleep: go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, don't eat or drink too close to bedtime, don't watch TV or do work in bed, try a lavender bath, meditate, and on and on.

Mark Penn is onto something essential - we're simply medicating ourselves way too much. We use uppers (caffeine) and downers (Ambien, Lunesta) to try and gain equilibrium. I wonder if we scaled back on both we'd get a better night's sleep, save a lot of money, and be healthier?  Hmmmmm...I'll sleep on that.

Can Your iPod Help You Lose Weight, Reduce Your Blood Pressure, and Alleviate Pain?

The last thing Steve Jobs needs is more hype, but there still may be a market that he hasn't fully tapped. All of us are intuitively aware that music can alter behavioral patterns -- who hasn't experienced that wonderful moment when a soothing lullaby stops a baby's cries or the rousing feeling we get when listening to John Williams' Star Wars score?

I recently discovered that there was an organized field of health care called music therapy. According to the American Music Therapy Association, programs designed by trained professionals and specifically tailored to medical issues (pain or stress management, for instance) can improve the quality of a person's physical, emotional, or cognitive health. And since 1994 Medicare has covered many of these treatments.

But what I find really exciting is that a slew of new studies are providing hard scientific validation of our anecdotal insights.

1.    Music and Weight Loss

Christopher Capuano, the director of the school of psychology at Farleigh Dickinson University, reported that "exercising can be difficult for someone who is obese. Walking to music seemed to really motivate women in our study to get out there and stick with the commitment they made." As part of an overall weight reduction program for women who were overweight to moderately obese (BMIs ranged from 26.1 to 41.7) that included dieting, aerobic exercise, and participation in group meetings, his team also gave a portable CD player to half the women to use when they walked. The other half did not walk to music. The women who played music lost significantly more weight and fewer of them dropped out of the program.

2.    Music and Pain

Dr. Mark Liponis, the medical director of the Canyon Ranch spa, reports in his upcoming book, Ultra-Longevity, on a Korean study that found that music therapy actually reduced the pain of fractures in people with broken legs. He also cites a study in the journal Clinical Research in Cardiology of heart patients who listened to music while undergoing uncomfortable catheterization -- their anxiety levels were significantly reduced if music was played during the procedure.

3.    Music and Blood Pressure

Mark Jude Tramo, a musician and neuroscientist at the Harvard Medical School, is exploring how the biology of music has benefits far beyond entertainment. According to Tramo, "one study showed that the heart muscle of people exercising on treadmills didn't work as hard when people listened to music as it did when they exercised in silence." Other studies have shown that patients in intensive cardiac care units where music is played need lower doses of blood pressure-lowering drugs than patients in units where no music is played.

I personally use a device called Resperate that coordinates my breathing with musical sequences as an aide in controlling my blood pressure.

4.    Music and Alzheimer's

One of the most active areas of research is in using music as a tool to help soothe Alzheimer's patients. A month-long music therapy study at the University of Miami School of Medicine discovered that blood levels of melatonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine -- all natural mood-enhancing substances -- rose significantly in all patients during the study. The participants in the study slept better and became more cooperative and active.

5.  Music and Cancer

According to the Ayurvedic practitioner Pratima Raichur, "preliminary studies at Ohio State University have found evidence that the primordial sounds of the Veda [spoken Hindu scriptures] decreased growth of cancer cells in rats."

A study of adults -- humans, that is! -- undergoing highly toxic high-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation, conducted at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Integrative Medicine Service demonstrated that trained musical therapists could significantly reduce patient anxiety.

When my father was dying of multiple myeloma, a form of bone-marrow cancer, I made sure to supply him with recordings of his favorite music. Had I known then about the benefits of professionally administered music therapy, I surely would have made use of their skills as well. I can tell you one thing -- I'm going to start listening to my iPod in the gym with a new set of ears.

Botox and Emotional Expression

In Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris wrote: "Modern psychologists have supported Darwin's idea that extreme emotions -- great joy, rage, disgust, fear -- are registered on the face, and that these facial expressions are universally recognized (and therefore biologically wired in). We should be happy for this bit of adaptvie advantage, too, these researchers add, because it means we will always be able to tell whether a stranger is happy or about to attach us in a fury."

Hmmm.....what does botox do to our ability to interpret facial cues? Are we be able to tell if our boss is upset?  Or pleased?

Because Botox prevents frowns, Rob Horning wondered what are the consequences if people always seem content?

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/65037/forced-smiles/

Seems like the face of life experience might be evolving in unhelpful ways. What do you think?

Politically Incorrect Gender Equality

Eight years ago Barbara and Allan Pease wrote the following: "The education system favors boys and disadvantages girls in mathematical exams because studies show that girls suffering PMS have testosterone levels that are significantly lower during this phase. One study showed that girls with PMS scored 14 percent lower on mathematical exams when they had PMS than girls who weren't suffering PMS. A fairer system would be to arrange exams to take place at a time that is biologically more suitable for girls. Boys can take the tests at any time."

I was disturbed by this finding. Could it be that in our push for equality, we've ended up supporting a system that penalizes us for a biological difference? All I know is that I sure wish I'd read their book, Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, when it was first published. As the mother of two daughters in college, think of the advantage such a simple fact might have provided them during their punishing two years of standardized test taking. And for those of you with daughters taking the SATs, it might behoove you to focus on the test date a little bit more intimately.

Don't you think this is something our educators should discuss?

The Brain Gender Gap

I love quizzes of al most any sort. Where do I fall in the political spectrum? Do I like Venice or Florence better? Am I high maintenance (see Fountain of Youth Index). I found this test purporting to reveal the gender of my brain interesting. 

Turns out my brain is pretty evenly male/female. My husband's brain is slightly female, one of my daughter's is typically female and the other daughter is the most male in the family.

I'm not sure if this reveals a weakness in the quiz or in the underlying assumptions of hard-wired gender-ness. Or if it shows the folly of binary thinking.

What do you think?