Let there be light

• Anyone else sad when the Sun starts to go down at 5pm? Check out this blog post from a guy who decided to install a fake Sun in his home office. 35,000 Lumens for about $120. He notes better productivity. Certainly some mood enhancement for folks who get the Winter Blues.
• I enjoyed his bell curve drawing of seasonal mood / brain changes. People don’t either have seasonal affective disorder or not. Also liked his description of cool vs warm light – even though LEDs are in the 5000k range (cool), they have a smoother and therefore more healthy spectrum (throw away your CFL bulbs!). Incandescent are the best though. 
• I haven’t bought all the equipment he describes, waiting for one that is already put together.

 

Its all about the Process(ing)

• No publication yet on this study, but see this press release on AHA data from NHANES, a data set of 13,000 people. 
• Take home points: 1. Americans get more than 50% of calories from ultra processed foods. 2. Ultraprocessed foods lead to BAD heart outcomes
• Some tips:
Shop the perimeter of the grocery
Eat foods your grandmother would recognize
Avoid foods with more than 5 ingredients
Avoid foods made in a factory
• “Humans are the only animal smart enough to manufacture their own food, and dumb enough to eat it.” – Cant find who said this

Muscle Up

• Stop what you are doing and watch this hour long presentation from Dr. Doug McGuff. Dr. McGuff is an ER doc and self-professed exercise geek whom we have mentioned on PWellness. His book Body by Science is one of the best exercise books ever written. 
• This lecture is an evidence-packed argument for why muscle strength and mass could be the key to longevity. In this talk Dr. McGuff covers work by Dr. David Sinclair on aging, robust cardiovascular outcomes data, and an ample supply of common sense. 
• You can build muscle and therefore live a longer health and life span without a huge time investment. Minimum Effective Dose. 

Aging

• Speaking of Dr. David Sinclair, check out his new book Lifespan. Dr. Sinclair is a huge research name in the fight against the “disease of aging.” The book’s content ranges from simple, practical tips to wild schemes to let one live to 180 years old. Refreshingly, he does not try to sell anything. The two supplements he believes in are resveratrol and NMN (niacin formulation). He also talks about calorie restriction, fasting, and many other little hacks to help us live longer. 

Chaos or Paradise?

• The quote below reminds me of when the electronic medical record has “downtime.” You think it’ll just be pure mayhem, all the docs and nurses unable to chart on the computer and check orders. But then you start to focus on what is important: getting the patient what he or she needs. Forget about writing stuff down for billing. It is liberating, really.
• The book Civilized to Death is about how the hunger gatherer life was probably more ideal for humans than our civilized world today. 

When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw. When the authoritarian structures supposedly protecting us from our dark Hobbesian nature collapse into dust and chaos, more often than not, all heaven breaks loose. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit documents how human beings from various cultures respond to calamity–not by looting, but by lending a hand. After reviewing the sociological literature and hundreds of personal accounts from disaster survivors, she concluded that “the image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.” Research accumulated over decades of studying how people behave in earthquakes, floods, and bombings shows that our behavior is the opposite. “Disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise,” says Solnit, “the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.” 

Little bit of noise

• Cool post from Jane Friedman on creativity and your surroundings. Apparently the ideal level of noise for human creativity is 70 decibels, “crash of ocean waves breaking on the shore, the study thrum of crickets, and wind rustling tree leaves.” Researchers “theorize that a moderate (vs. low) level of ambient noise is likely to induce processing disfluency or processing difficulty, which activates abstract cognition and consequently enhances creative performance. A high level of noise, however, reduces the extent of information processing, thus impairing creativity.”
• Turns out this 70 decibels is about the level of a busy coffee shop. Anyone else love to sit in a coffee shop to get work done? Only glitch is when a loud talker (possibly even worse than a close talker) sits next to you. The noise is no longer “white.”
• If you want the noise of a coffee shop in the comfort of your home or office, check out www.coffivity.com. It is simply looped sounds from coffee shops around the world. 

Sludge

• Why does it take an hour to sign forms to buy a house? Why is the income tax process so time consuming. The answer: bureaucratic sludge. Apparently in the US we lose about 11 BILLION hours to sludge. Wonder how much time it took to determine that?
• This article from the Boston Globe was written by ER doc Jeremy Faust (and Cass Sunstein). They point out the sludge involved in obtaining an X Waiver (the DEA license waiver that allows a doctor to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid dependence). Say what you will about treating opioid dependence with more opioids, but the X waiver really doesn’t make much sense if buprenorphine is safer than most other opioids. 
• But I appreciated the larger point of the inefficiency, and downright damage in some cases, of wasting time. We should perform some sludge audits in the hospital and office setting.

Quote
Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence, when it gives birth to conscious intelligences?
– Cicero 44 B.C.