Today I Learned...

A++, would read again.

As I've been saying about autism and depression for years: it is possible for a psychological disorder to simultaneously be over diagnosed yet have its treatment methods underutilized. In some ways, people with real clinical disorders are the large print versions of everyone else, making it easier to see problems and test solutions. Proving exercise helps clinical depression* is easier than proving exercise helps you when you're having a bad day, but it's easy to see how the knowledge transfers.

Stuff fits into that rather well. I watch Hoarders as a motivational tool, and they continually present you with truly awful cases- people who are are about to lose their children, spouse, or home due to their hoarding- but don't really explain why, beyond "it's a disease." Stuff goes into the psychology behind it: hoarding is associated with a constellation of other issues, including:

• slow decision making
  
• uncertainty in relationships with people and highly variable relationships with people
  
• emotional deprivation in childhood (far moreso than physical deprivation, which surprised me)
  
• intelligence (which is not the impression you'd get watching Hoarders, but of course the people who need to accept expensive 11th hour help in exchange for parading their problems on TV are not a random sample)
  
• over anthropomorphism of objects
  
• the construct of your stuff being an extension of you.
  
• fear of waste/belief that being wasteful accrues you bad karma
  
• fear of mistakes/fear of being wrong/perfectionism
  
• greater than baseline need to prepare for eventualities
  
• a lot of time spent thinking about using your stuff, relative to actually using it
  
• a need for completeness
  
• unwillingness to suffer short term pain for long term gains (possibly because they don't believe the long term gains will materialize)
  
• ability to minimize the immediate term pain of not cleaning by filtering things out
  

Not surprisingly, I see at least a few issues in me, my family, my friends, the people across the street, etc. This is where it would be really useful to find the hoarding equivalent of exercise, but the book doesn't cover that, apparently because it doesn't exist yet. We're only just beginning to understand hoarding and how it differs from OCD, and treatment is in its infancy. If the hoarding was brought on by specific trauma you can often help by treating the trauma, but many cases are not. They did mention the downward arrow technique as a tool, which looks neat.

Pulling back from the content a bit, the book was extremely well written, well organized, and easy to read while still conveying the weight of the subject matter. Highly recommended.

Herxheimer.

A Herxheimer reaction is when an infection dies off faster than your body can clear out the waste products of that die off, so you temporarily feel worse than before, even though you ought to be getting better. Here is why the word Herxheimer is awesome.

1. It's a fun, ominous word to say.
   
2. Its abbreviation, Herx, is even cooler.
   
3. It's a cool, counter intuitive effect with an edge of danger.
   
4. But not too dangerous, so you don't have to feel bad about pronouncing it gleefully.
   

You know, they were doing really well in their descriptions of violence. I think there might have been a bit of idealization/noble savagery going on, but their ending paragraph to the chapter was "humans do a wide variety of things depending on circumstances. Don't confuse reaction to circumstances with inborn traits", and that was awesome. My complaints on their handling of penises still held water- humans have larger testicles and penises than many other primates, but they're both tiny and boring if you expand your horizons beyond monkeys- but apparently there's experimental evidence backing the penis-as-vacuum-plunger hypothesis.

And then, we had total fail. They assert that penis and testicle size correlate positively with non-monogamy. This is semi true. The testicle thing is well supported (in brief: in species where females mate with multiple males in a short time period, males will produce more sperm), you can tell some stuff from penises, but I wasn't listening because of the aforementioned reference point fail. But in the only bit of true science in the book, they suggest that if penis size correlates with mating structure in humans, then penis size will vary among races. They examined some survey data, and what do you know, it does. Hypothesis proved.



I guess they missed the step in the scientific method where if you want to prove two things are correlated, you have to examine them both and prove that they vary together. Merely proving they both vary isn't that compelling. There could be 400 billion reasons why penis and testicle size varies between humans, and the only one they backed up was body mass.

Maybe I should think of this as a documentary, not a nonfiction book. I'm fine with documentaries forming convenient narratives because I view their job as conveying emotional truth, not strict facts. And Sex at Dawn does reasonably well at showing how humans survive and thrive in many different settings and we shouldn't assume that the one we settled on in 18th century Europe will serve us well forever. But it's also a prime example of doctors and psychologists playing dress up as scientists and fundamentally not getting it.

I just watched Dogs Decoded on Netflix streaming, and I'm pretty impressed. It was interesting, well explained, well backed up, and while simplified in places, it was not done in such a way as to create misleading impressions. Way to go PBS. My biggest complaint is that in all their talk about how humans and dogs evolved together, they didn't introduce the evidence that humans experienced the hallmarks of domestication (large head, prolonged childhood and maintenance of neotonous features into adulthood, weakening of certain senses) at the same time dogs did, but I can understand not wanting to fit that into a 50 minute program.

The website has a a test to see if you can match dog barks with dog emotions. I did great at the aggressive barks but floundered with various happy barks, which makes sense, because as a lifelong dog avoider those are the barks I'd need to know, but was also the most common pattern among test takers, which makes sense, because if you're in a world with dogs but don't own one yourself, recognizing imminent attacks is more important than distinguishing "I want to play" from "I want a walk". What I find especially interesting is that I was better at identifying the emotions of random dogs I couldn't see than I am at identifying the emotions of cats I have owned and loved for years. Every cat I've owned makes the same noise no matter what it wants- out, food, toys, love- and you guess what they want based on their location. I hesitate to say dogs have a more sophisticated language, but humans do seem to have an understanding with them we don't have with cats. If you have any interest in animal behavior or human evolution, I encourage you to check it out.

Side note: since last Christmas, Surviving Childhood Cat has developed an "I'm being tortured" meow that he uses to request attention and food. 16 years old seems like an odd time to develop this sound.

I've always believed that, with a couple of notable exceptions (hello, hohos), your body knows what it wants, and its cravings should be indulged. The fact that the cravings for what I at first referred to as "crack brownies" and "crack fudge" eventually went away and left me indifferent to the food in question was evidence that I was lacking some trace nutrient that they contained, and once I was full I stopped craving them. There are even times a Pepsi sounds disgusting to me. And I'm pretty sure this does happen, because if you chart my bell pepper consumption over time, there's a pretty big standard deviation. But...

Certain foods do cause allergic reactions. Some of these are big and obvious and will lead you to never eat that food again and do not require subtle hints from your body as to the wisdom of eating more. talking about food addiction in this context seemed stupid, except in the case of the truly hyperpalatable. I'll believe that my stomach system is incapable of weighing how shitty I will feel later with how awesome that ice cream will make me feel for the first 10 seconds. But surely it can tell if a vegetable is good for me or not?

Well, maybe no. Your body adjusts to the presence of toxins, and it releases certain potentially pleasurable chemicals (e.g. adrenaline) to help you cope. In that context, you very literally can get addicted to a food that is bad for you, even though that food was available during the evolutionarily relevant time period. Now, I'd like to think my stomach is smart enough to avoid this. But this is the same stomach that starts hating food and never wants to eat again if I go three hours without a snack. It's just possible I've been giving my stomach too much credit here.

So where does that leave me? I still believe the body will respond to nutrient shortages by making you crave food with that nutrient. But it also appears quite plausible that it will send an indistinguishable signal when it's going through withdrawal over something that's really bad for me. The only way to tell the difference involves note taking and charts and crap. I can only do that for a week before I get bored. And allergen free diets are hard. And what if I'm allergic to dairy? I like diary. I need dairy right now to get sufficient protein. The current craving object is Trader Joe's full fat Cottage Cheese, plus my protein powder is partially whey, plus I might be a little addicted to cheese because of the pain in my jaw**. It's not like mounds of tofu are good for you.

Side note: Can we take any diet* that bases its claims on "we evolved for this" seriously if it doesn't tell us to eat bugs? If so, why?


*used in the scientific sense, not the calorie-restriction sense

**I got a massive cavity *right next* to the neuralgia, so the pain didn't seem actionable. I'm having it filled next week, because the pain signal is unreliable we won't know if I need a root canal until "an abscess appears on the x-ray"