Going Off the Path for Sunday Brunch OR Why I Read, Scientific American Mind

Danny and I decided to go to Boulder this morning for brunch. The plan was to go to Waffle Brothers, which was ridiculousness since there is a location much closer to home. Still it's hard to top their food. It was trying something new without really trying anything new. The sight upon our arrival was very strange with condensation on the door, rotting bananas in the window, and a hand-written sign that said, "closed until further notice." Thanks to a Yelp search, Plan B became The Buff, which was featured on Man vs. Food. Sadly, this was also not meant to be as by the time we found it, which was unnecessarily tough, there was a 45 minute wait. I want to believe it would have been worth it, but at that point it was just after 11:00 a.m. and neither of us had eaten anything yet. I had seen a local,chain brewery across the street so that became Plan C. Suddenly Danny asks if Plan C.1 can be daphne's California Greek. After paroozing the menu on the glass, I was in. When we got inside I saw they had Lemon Chicken soup for $1.69. I am willing to try just about anything that could be a viable Colorado substitute for lemon rice soup, especially when it costs less than two dollars. Danny tried the soup first, and had this look of, Laurie, you're going to enjoy this... Enjoy it, I did! So much so that three more bowls came home with us, and I did a little happy dance in the booth. The consistency is different without the rice, but the flavor is truly the closest thing I have found outside the region to this soup that I love so much! 

Danny thanked me for my flexibility, I told him that we had physically gone off the path as inspired by The Happiness Project.  I was grateful that he understood what I meant. 

I think part of my response was that I had been thinking about this post as I have been reading the September/October issue of Scientific American Mind for over a week now. I picked up this magazine on a trip to Barnes & Noble while I was on a mission for a book of KenKen puzzles - which is my latest fascination. There I go off the path (read: digressing), again. I think I was drawn by the larger than life picture and headline on the cover - Get Real - Avoid the Pitfalls of Self Esteem as I had been mulling (borderline obsessing) over last week's Ten on Tuesday: Ten Things THIS WOMAN Needs to Stop Doing because sharing one's self esteem issues with whomever chooses to read them is not exactly my idea of a good time. 

What I found was an interesting scientific journal format rather than a typical magazine as there were a mere five advertisements throughout the whole 76 page publication. I am not sure how they make any money, but considering there is a new issue on newsstands, they must have figured something out. To be completely honest there were a few pieces that were beyond my non-science brain, but for the most part the writing had a nice blend of research and explanations that a layperson, like me, could understand. While each article had a section that listed further reading options - I do not think any of them will be read by me.

Let's get to the content:

• The first section called Social Medicine - How interacting with the people around us makes us healthier, happier, and longer lived - helped give scientific backing to many of the things that I am trying to do:
• Your "roaming entropy," or the frequency or variety with which you get out and about likely affects your brain health. In a study of adult mice, the animals with higher roaming entropy had a great proliferation of adult-born neurons. 
• I think the brunch adventure chronicled earlier could count as roaming entropy.

• Kind hearts are healthier - volunteering improves cardiovascular health.
• Keeping others motivated could improve your own motivation for healthy behaviors.
  
  
• Even small talk helps - social isolation, not loneliness, is linked with earlier death.
• Isolation is known to shorten lives - psychologists have discovered that even superficial contact with other people may improve our health. My fear of isolation was noted last week.
  
  
• Contagious altruism - altruism inspires more altruism, according to many studies as generosity is its own reward. People around the world are happier the more they donate to charity. Yea for sharing with others rather than only taking care of ourselves!
  
  
• Contagious yawning emerges in children at the age of five or six. It may relate to empathy, which also develops around this time. This got me thinking about the yawning man from the movie, Tom Thumb. Did that happen to anyone else?
  
  
• Social Skills to Crow About
• The intelligence of the corvid family - a group of birds that includes crows, ravens, magpies, rooks, and jackdaws (I had to look some of these up) - rivals that of apes and dolphins. Recent studies are revealing impressive details about crows' social reasoning, offering hints about how our own interpersonal intelligence may have evolved. 
• A study was conducted with birds in a Seattle park in which the scientists wore two kinds of masks. One mask would trap the birds, the other would simply walk on by. Five years later these scientists returned with their masks - the birds present at the original trapping shared the incident with all the birds there on that particular day. All the crows responded by immediately mobbing that masked scientist while shrieking. 
• Somehow this gives a whole new meaning to me for Poe's The Raven or Hitchcock's The Birds.
• Apparently pigeons can learn to distinguish a painting by Picasso from one by Monet - I am not completely sure I could do that without first brushing up on their work (no pun intended).
  
  
• Life of a Drug
• Decades of research and billions of dollars go into developing a marketing drugs. Here is a very abbreviated profile (really the parts that I found interesting) of Cymbalta, which is produced by Eli Lilly.
• The drug that became Cymbalta was initially discovered in the early 1950s by tuberculosis researchers as they found a drug that treats infections also boosts patients' moods.
• Fast forward to 2013 with a lot of information, studies, and processes in between, Cymbalta goes off patent at the end of the year. Lilly is expected to lay off up to 1,000 sales workers in anticipation of the revenue loss. Cymbalta and osteoporosis drug Evista together bring in $5 billion (with a B) annually to Eli Lilly. Evista goes off patent in early 2014.
  
  
• Head Lines: The Mysteries of Pain
• Migraines look different in men and women; 3:1 ratio of the prevalence of migraines in women to men in a one year period.
• During a migraine:
• Women experience more intense emotional responses to pain.
• Men are more sensitive to heat, such as from a hot cup of coffee or a steamy shower.
• There is such a thing as a cluster headache, which just sounds awful, and tend to turn up in cycles lasting six to eight weeks.
• During these cycles, afflicted individuals - more often men - experience intense daily headaches on one side of the head, each lasting an hour or two, explains headache expert (what a title) Peter Goadsby, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
• Memory of a pain can cause the pain to persist for life, even after the initial injury has healed - this could explain the pain I feel in my right wrist from time to time as I have broken it twice.
• I have an unhealthy (literally) love of many of the top migraine triggers (e.g. chocolate, nuts, peanut butter, and dairy products). CRAP!
  
  
• Letting Go of Self-Esteem
• Self-esteem, or a person's overall sense of self-worth, is generally considered to be critical to healthy functioning. Its darker side, however, had been largely overlooked. The quest for great self-esteem, primarily that which is  contingent upon success, can leave people feeling empty and dissatisfied.
• To feel good about yourself, think less about YOU and more about OTHERS.
• Compassion toward others and yourself (in other words we should cut ourselves some slack), along with a less self-centered perspective on your situation can motivate you to achieve your goals while helping you weather bad news, learn from your mistakes, and fortify your friendships.
• Scientists define self-esteem as the amount of value people place on themselves - an inherently subject assessment.
• High self-esteem seems to have at least one serious drawback: difficulty in seeing your own shortcomings. A great deal of research conducted for several decades shows that people with high self-esteem tend to have unrealistically high views of themselves.
• When they get negative feedback, they tend to be defensive, blaming the test or the messenger, rather than owning up to a mistake or deficiency.
• Putting your self-worth at the mercy of achievement creates emotional vulnerability to setbacks.
• This brought to mind one of my favorite quotes, "Never confuse having a career with having a life."
• While the pursuit of self-esteem has many negative consequences, it also serves an important purpose: motivating us to action. Without the urge to prove our worth, might we turn into slackers?
• There is a healthier approach, instead of focusing on our own status (however that is defined), we can focus on others or the collective good.
• As hard as my job is at times - I try to take satisfaction in knowing that I am helping the people who help others.
• By focusing on others, having self-compassion, or adopting a distanced view (seeing yourself from a third-party perspective), you can work toward your goals with constant self-evaluation and self-criticism. What a concept!
  
• The Science of Handwriting
• What our hands do with a keyboard is very different than with pen and paper. For most people, typing becomes automatic after a few months of instructions. Learning the precise geometries that make up handwritten characters, however, takes years.
• A central property of handwriting: it unifies hand, eye, and attention at a single point in space and time. Typing on a keyboard, breaks the unity.
• The so-called Common Core standards, a set of guidelines issued in 2010 to unify state curricula in the U.S., has set off a national discussion about handwriting's place in school.
• Much of the discussion involves cursive education, which went unmentioned in the standards, leading to its formal abandonment by Indiana and Florida.
• The ensuing backlash prompted eight states, including California and a chastened Indiana to affirm cursive's importance.
• While I could have done with Mrs. Pagorek in 5th grade telling me that my cursive "x" was done incorrectly, EVERY TIME. I am grateful that I can read/write in cursive as there is something special about taking a pen to paper. 
• I also like the individuality that handwriting provides - there is nothing unique about a computer print out. It takes the personalization out of correspondence, which is already vanishing from social etiquette again much to my chagrin.
• There are scientific studies, however, that back up the importance of writing words to help with recall and learning - hopefully it will still be taught in our schools for years to come. I, personally, would be willing to give up Geometry in favor of handwriting lessons. My own bias, of course.

The last two articles that I want to highlight both fall within the field of Mental Health:

• Listening to Voices - Adapted from a talk at TED in Long Beach, California in February, 2013.
• Eleanor began to hear the Voice in her second semester of undergraduate studies. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which brought the full burden of social disapproval on her shoulders, and initiated a downward spiral  into despair and hopelessness.
• She was encouraged to see the Voice as a symptom rather than an experience, which intensified her fear and resistance. She was engaged in a psychic civil war. 
• She now sees the voices as a solution, an inextricable part of the healing process that drew attention to emotional conflicts she needed to deal with as she had significant, unresolved childhood trauma.
• There is evidence that a proportion of the 1.5 million people who are diagnosed each year with schizophrenia are not victims of chemical imbalance or genetic mutation. Rather they are exhibiting a complex response to abuse, loss, neglect, or past trauma.
• Eleanor earned her psychology degree with high honors 10 years after the voice first came, a year later her master's degree also with highest honors, and she is currently in the final year of her PhD. In her words, "not bad for a mad woman."
• As a doctor once told her, "Don't tell me what other people have told you about yourself...tell me about you. What if we could share with others a healthy view of ourselves, instead of what we have been told...
  
  
• Clutter, Clutter Everywhere
• As an avid follower of American Pickers on History, I am quite fascinated by collectors (which really strike me as varying degrees/types of hoarders). I have never been able to watch the TLC show, Hoarders.
• Hoarding disorder appears to be present in between 2 and 5 percent of the population, making it more prevalent than schizophrenia. It afflicts men and woman in about equal numbers.
• Many laypeople believe that clinical hoarders are too lazy to discard their junk or that they enjoy living with it. Neither of these assumptions appear to be true.
• Most experts have long believed that extreme hoarding is a variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Recent research suggests that the ailment may stem from an exaggerated version of a basically adaptive tendency to accumulate materials that are important to us.
• The American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual (DSM-5), published this past May, for the first time included pathological hoarding as a distinct condition. It is characterized by extreme and enduring difficulties parting with possessions even if they have no tangible value.
• No one knows why hoarders hoard, which is part of why it is challenging to treat. 
• Interestingly, the behavior is present in a  host of species, including honeybees, crows, rodents, and monkeys. This observation raises the possibility that the condition reflects a naturally selected urge to stockpile resources for times of scarcity.
• With the formal recognition of hoarding disorder in the DSM-5, research into causes of pathological hoarding will likely increase, and with it, the promise of more effective therapies.

I continue to be fascinated each time I go off the path. My next venture takes me into the triathlon world in the form of a magazine that is different than the one to which Danny is subscribed. Perhaps it will help broaden my view of Danny's hobby/interest that shows no sign of diminishing - in fact he is looking for ways to do good for others through the Ironman. I am proud to think that he is looking for his own ways to do good for others as he and I are quite fortunate. Plus Fireman Rob's altruism may have been contagious - I think Danny caught it.