Could how heavy you are correlate to how strongly your brain reacts to the scent of bread wafting from a nearby bakery or backyard BBQ? Studies show that your senses (like smell and taste) react to inputs from the world around you, and not everyone’s neurobiological reactions are the same.

Despite decades of research, the truth is that scientists don’t exactly know why some people are overweight or obese, and some people aren’t. What we do know is that it’s not just about caloric intake, or activity level (though both do have some impact), and it’s not just about your genes. It’s mostly not about the type of food you eat, as carb-rich diets vs. protein-rich diets have generally been found to be equally unsuccessful for long-term weight loss (although processed foods — which tend to be carbs — definitely contribute to weight gain). And it’s not just about your psychology, or about how you were parented, though certainly family eating style is relevant.

It definitely *is* about how all of these things come together; calories in, activity level, metabolism as determined by genes, family eating, and brain chemistry.

All of which makes finding a ‘cure’ for obesity problematic. Rising levels of overweight kids and adults in the United States (and around the world; Northern and Western European countries both have rates of obesity around the same as ours) prove that nothing tried so far is working. And with chubby kids much more likely to grow up to become adults who are heavy, this is an issue that’s not going away.

But some studies point to the idea that different people deal with sensory inputs in various ways and may give us insight into some of the triggers of overeating, which is still at the heart of the issue for most overweight people.

An experiment at Maastricht University in The Netherlands shows us that there are some fundamental differences between overweight and normal-weight children’s caloric intake after exposure to the smell and taste of food. In the 2003 experiment, children were exposed to tasty smelling food for ten minutes, and then given food to eat; the normal weight kids tended to eat less than they would have if they hadn’t smelled the food first, which means they were at least partially satisfied just by enjoying the aroma of the food. On the other hand, the overweight kids actually ate more food after the exposure to delicious smells. The same went for if the kids were given a small snack beforehand.

What does this data mean?

You can read the rest of the text of this article over at Hypervocal.

So much so that when our boyfriend/husband/long-term hookup is away from us, we like to keep a bit of something they wore around (or wear it ourselves); T-shirts are an almost-universal favorite. And this is not just silly pining — though surely the guys are missed — it has to do with the fact that smell conjures up more than just pleasant memories of the beloved.

For years, it wasn’t clear whether or not human beings produced (and responded to) pheromones, as we knew unequivocally that animals did. Pheromones are how most animals communicate their readiness to mate, as well as other information, and aren’t just ‘smells’ but specific chemical signals that are picked up by specialized receptors. Numerous studies over the last 15 years have proved that humans also exude and pick up on these signals (but we don’t ‘smell’ them in our nose, we process them in one of the oldest parts of our brain, the hypothalamus).

Not only do pheromones exist, but they are actually incredibly complex. Turns out that we can smell all kinds of details about someone, especially someone of the opposite sex (but only if we’re heterosexual; homosexuals generally respond to sex signals and information from members of their own sex).

According to ABC News: “Women’s hypothalami are activated when they smell the chemical similar to testosterone but not to the estrogen-like substance, whereas men’s hypothalami have the opposite response: They are turned on only by the estrogen-like chemical and not the testosterone-like one. There is also sexual disparity between the specific sub-regions of hypothalamus that are activated.”

One of the things we can smell on our partners — or even randoms that we get close enough to — is whether they have had sex recently. (Irresistibly attracted to that hottie next to you in yoga class? He may have just had a roll in the hay and neglected to shower). A Journal of Neuroscience study backs up what cuckolded spouses have long known: Humans emit specific pheromones when they have sex, and they can be detected. Take note, cheating partners:

Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the right orbitofrontal cortex, right fusiform cortex, and right hypothalamus respond to airborne natural human sexual sweat, indicating that this particular chemosensory compound is encoded holistically in the brain. Our findings provide neural evidence that socioemotional meanings, including the sexual ones, are conveyed in the human sweat.

To read the end of this article, click here!

According to Scientific American:

“A lot of communication in the animal world occurs via volatile, information-carrying “scent” chemicals, many of which remain to be chemically identified.

Generally speaking, pheromones are a type of infochemical used within a species to influence social behaviors and attract mates whereas kairomones send signals between different species and are often used to detect predators and prey.”

It makes sense that animals would emit and sense different scents interspecies vs. intraspecies, doesn’t it?

In the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology survey of environmental sound, a questionnaire was passed to a small survey of 77 people, who were asked to categorize noise, and then to judge it (which means to say whether the sound had positive or negative connotations).

According to Catherine Guastavino, the author of the paper, “Human and natural sounds gave rise to positive judgments (except when reflecting anger), whereas mechanical sounds gave rise to negative judgments. This distinction was even observed within certain categories such as music, which gave rise to two opposing qualitative evaluations depending on whether it reflected human activity directly (“musician”) or indirectly (“loudspeakers” “car radio”).”

Live, human-created music was almost universally received positively (think buskers playing music that’s not your style), whereas recorded music choices were seen as negative, unless the person was choosing to listen to their own recorded music or favorite radio station.

Conclusion: Your music is noise, my music fills the world with what I love to hear.

I’ve been greatly enjoying a read through “The Best American Science Writing: 2009” and there’s a bit of research in Atul Gawande’s piece “The Itch” from The New Yorker (featured in the compendium) that got me thinking about the debate about virtual worlds vs. real ones. I’ve come to the conclusion that not much separates the two, though of course we like to make a big deal about how some folks are disappearing into a computer-created world, and how this is such a terrible thing.

It certainly SEEMS awful that some people would prefer a world other than the one that’s outside. In the wake of the reports of the people who are ‘depressed’ that Avatar’s Pandora (the planet on which all the gorgeous CG action occurs in the film) doesn’t exist, my environmentalist friends have shaken their collective head, pointing out that there’s a pretty beautiful world right outside if you’d just step away from the computer screen or exit the movie theatre. But Pandora is just the latest in a long line of created worlds.

Pandora has existed in James Cameron’s head since he was a kid, and he’s been working on the Avatar project for 15 years, obsessed enough (and powerful enough) to create a version of it that millions of people will see. Cameron’s longtime producer, Jon Landeau, told Wired that the project is “..not just a movie. It’s a world,” and purposefully so. Now I might be biased, having invented an imaginary world as a child (with a similar – but, ahem- much more creative name- mine was called Poentica) but the fact is that Pandora existed wholly formed and in great detail in Cameron’s head, just as my imaginary world existed in mine, and other virtual worlds have filled minds from Star Wars to Buffy and even before TV existed (Greek myths anyone?).

So made-up worlds have always been with us, but the reason I’m going to argue for the virtual is not because we have a history of otherworlds. It’s because the so-called real world isn’t as real as we think. Which means that maybe our virtual worlds, from Pandora to Second Life, and whatever comes next are just as important as this one, or could be.

This is because how we think we perceive the ‘real’ world, (as opposed to virtual ones), involves a fundamentally flawed understanding of how the brain works. Most of us think that our eyes, ears, noses and hands perceive each moment anew, freshly gathering data and shunting it to our brain, which receives it, processes it, and gives us a constantly updated version of the world. As Gawande points out in The New Yorker piece (see page 4, halfway down), this idea of how we understand the world, called “direct perception” is actually incorrect. In 1710 the Irish philosopher George Berkeley wrote, “We do not know the world of objects, we know only our mental idea of objects.” And Berkeley was right (though he went on to mistakenly credit the Christian god with “putting” the info there).

What actually happens is that we gather little new information from moment to moment from our environments (and actually little sensory data even when we enter new environments). Instead we rely on our brains’ previous experience to create a picture, recognize a smell, or figure a texture. “Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals,” writes Gawande. This means that on an everyday basis, we are making up the world around us (from our brains’ previous experiences), even though we think we are creating it anew each time from our completely unbiased senses.

We know this above is true because studies made on the brain show that “If visual perceptions were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty percent do; eighty percent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory,” write Gawande. This is not the sign of a faulty brain, just one working efficiently. Why waste the time and energy putting together new maps of perception in various senses if, for most humans, most of the time, it’s just a whole lot of the same-old same-old?

My argument becomes obvious now; if eighty to ninety percent of what we think we see, hear, touch or smell is coming from our own memories, then virtual worlds, which are wholly created by our minds (or Cameron’s, or whoever) aren’t that far off from reality, seeing as we perceive such a small part of it anyway.

So are highly developed, oft-visited and much beloved virtual worlds really any less real than what’s outside your window if most of what’s on the other side of the glass is just our own memory of what it is anyway? That is- created by our minds?

All day, most days, I work alone. I’m not breaking any stereotypes when I reveal I’m a blogger who spends half my day in pajamas, hair up, sipping green tea as I clickety-clack away on my trusty Macbook with a cat in my lap. I think it’s the best work I can think of, yet often my friends who work in more conventional settings marvel when I tell them I work from home, without any human contact (Terrell, my chatty yoga-loving postman, is sometimes my only real-world conversation partner for several days at a stretch). Yet I don’t feel alone.

Inside my mind, I feel as if I work with a coterie of some the most intelligent, forward-thinking, passionate and creative people I have ever (not) met. Because all day, most days, I’m exchanging information, opinion, frustrations (mostly professional, but sometimes personal), gossip, and ideas with people who do what I do. They are based in Florida, London, New York City, Maine, Colorado, San Francisco, South Africa, India, Los Angeles, and places in between. They have families, they are single; they live in tipis, off-grid, in City centers, suburbs, exurbs and even a yurt atop a lava field (OK, that’s me as I take writing sojourn in Hawaii).

And while it’s always interesting hearing about the weather, or local politics where they live, mostly it doesn’t matter. When I indulge in my favorite addiction (after coffee), travel, I’m always rooted by this dynamic group of colleagues online. We don’t work at the same company, and most of them I haven’t met. Yet I know this crew in enough depth that I cannot categorize them as anything less than friends.

And it so happens that because I get around the world, I have had a chance, over the years, to meet up with some of these amazing folks, and it’s been a consistently similar experience every time. A bit of a shock at first (nobody is ever the way you picture them, even if you’ve scrolled through 100 snapshots of them on Facebook), and then the comfort and sublimity that comes with being in the presence of a person who you really, genuinely like. Because you’re already friends. After marvelling at an unexpected accent, or surprising height (why are all my blogger friends so tall?) the conversation becomes one between intimates, friends. I’ve even felt comfortable enough to eat from their plates, (admittedly, a terrible habit but indicative of my ease).

So it’s always a bit frustrating to me to read about how the virtual world is pulling us apart, separating us from each other, or otherwise destroying the fabric of humanity bit by byte.

I don’t buy it. Because people have been making and keeping, or ignoring, and destroying friendships, family relationships and romances in various and sundry spectacular and terribly ordinary ways since the beginning of time. Just because we have new tools to do it with to doesn’t mean it’s happening more often, just that we now have options (breaking up via text, email, voicemail, letter or in person- any way you go it sucks, no?).

The upshot is that this means there are new ways to make friends too, and keep them, fresh venues in which to telegraph your love to your beloved, or your lust to your lover. Virtual palazzos to air your frustrations, your opinions, and to share your voice, even if your face is an avatar, and not your skin and bones mug.

The future involves us all working, playing (cavorting? there’s a fun thought), creating, communicating through devices and in virtual spaces. So what if they’re not ‘real’? As we know, reality is just a construct (more on this in an upcoming post), and so is the online world. What makes one more or less ‘real’ than the other? There are people, communities, and cultures in each space, art, sublime and ridiculous, conflict, collaboration, love and hate. And a lot of words. Sound familiar?

Additional communication spaces simply provide additional ways to be human, but does not mean the eradication of our humanness. If anything, it’s an expansion, because now we have more places in which to be who we are, to expand beyond our physical constraints and be a more fully expressive version of ourselves. And we get to meet people we otherwise never would have met. And what is aliveness about if not reaching our hand across a pathway, or a chatroom, and saying “Nice to meet you?” (Well, perhaps the latter is more like a smiley emoticon and a “Hey, what’s up?”)

Oh, and I just realized in writing this, that I must amend the title of this post. While some of my best friendships are virtual, the friends are real.

For anyone interested in the questions and thinking behind how technology is impacting who we are as human beings, the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Adbusters is a must-read.

Played as a dichotomy, The Natural World is one half of the mag, and flip it over and start at the other end and The Virtual World is the other half. It contains Adbusters’ usual thought-provoking and sometimes frustratingly challenging mix of art, commentary, articles, short meditations, low- and high-brow commentary. I particularly loved this quote from a 1994 (!) Harper’s Magazine article by Kevin Kelly, who is now the senior maverick at Wired Magazine, which is reprinted at the front of the Virtual half of the magazine:

“The Net conveys the logic of both the computer and nature. In nature, the Net finds form in, for example, the beehive. The hive is irredeemably social, unabashedly of many minds, but it decides as a whole when to swarm and where to move. A hive possesss an intelligence than none of its parts does. A single honeybee brain operates with a memory of six days; the hive as a whole operates with a memory of three months, twice as long as the average bee lives.

Although many philosophers in the past have suspected that one could abstract the laws of life and apply them to machines, it wasn’t until computers and man-made systems became as complex as living systems- as intricately composed as a beehive- that is was possible to prove this. Just as a beehive functions as if it were a single sentient organism, so does an electronic hive, made up of millions of buzzing, dim-witted personal computers, behave like a single organism.

Out of networked parts- whether of insects, neurons or chips- come learning, evolution and life. Out of a planet-wide swarm of silicon calculators comes an emergent self-governing intelligence: the Net. ”

This concept, of seeing technology (here the hardware and software that make up the web) as inherently natural (going along with the very arguable idea that humans are natural > humans create technology > technology is natural), goes against the grain of seeing tech as ‘apart’ from us.

Kelly goes back to this idea at the end of the reprinted piece when he writes:

“Instead of sucking the soul from human bodies, turning computer-users into an army of dull clones, networked computers-by reflecting the networked nature of our own brains and bodies- encourage the humanism of their users. Because they have taken on the flexibility, adaptability and self-connecting governance of organic systems, we become more human, not less so, when we use them.”

I wake up slowly, but once my eyes are open, the first thing I do is roll over, pick up my iPhone (which serves as my alarm clock) and check my email. Then I check my Facebook page, then the most recent and most emailed New York Times stories. It’s a cozy time, wrapped as I am in various layers of down comforter and three cats with enough fur for six. And my iPhone.

Then I finally get out of bed to answer my bladder’s insistent call.

As a blogger, being online is my life, and I’m lucky enough to say that I love my work. The art and craft of writing feeds my creative needs, the immediacy of instant publishing rewards my New York family’s legacy of impatience, and the myriad form and freedom of expression of digital mediums satisfies my inner anarchist (she hates rules even more than getting to bed early).

But ferreting about in the back of my mind is a concern, one shared by most of the people I know who spend their days tied to the hive mind of the Internet; Am I addicted to the Web? It’s not the physical tech that I’m attached to; my phone is just a hunk of plastic and metal; this I know. No, the thing that has crept on digital feet into my life from just-waking until I doze again is Information.

I’m not alone. In some families, limits must be set concerning laptop/phone/game use. How is that not an invasion? I relate to the NYTimes reflection: “Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day,” you’ve got to take a second look at what substance could possibly be so appealing that it would change ingrained habits and concerns. It’s certainly changed mine, and in just under a year. Fast-acting, addictive, and (arguably) isolating- sounds like a drug to me.

Has the desire for ever new Information invaded our lives?

For some of us, undoubtedly. When one friend actually cancelled his Internet service so he could get some real writing done (and I threatened to never visit him again), when my good friends who are living on dial-up in Vermont elicit genuine irritation at their lack of connectivity, and when a crummy signal (two bars instead of a full cohort on my Mac) brings my mood down a few notches, I have to believe that I’m suffering from some kind of beyond-healthy attachment to the Internet.

I’ve sourced my irritation to attachment, my attachment to fear. I am afraid of not knowing. Of missing something. Something important.

Some would say (like any addiction), the choices I make about how much time I spend online are my own. Nobody is forcing me to sit in front of the computer for hours a day, or half the night. This is true, but at least in the case of drugs and alcohol, the attachment is recognized and documented, and even the afflicted can see in the stories of thousands of others their own struggle. Internet addiction disorder is in the vein of sex addiction or compulsive eating; one needs to eat, to have sex, to work, so the addiction and the legitimate needs overlap.

Which brings me to why humans could be addicted to the Internet (or really, instantaneous or a consistent flow of information). Like sex or food attachments, our need for info is rooted in ancient beneficial adaptations. Our brain reward systems are set up to respond to fats and sugars, or sexual encounters, because over millennia, consumption (or indulgence) over abstinence in these areas resulted in the proliferation of our species. Simple.

Similarly, information gathering and dissemination has a (behavioural) evolutionary advantage; the people who knew the most had two advantages over the rest of the community. The first is straightforward: Logistical knowledge. Whatever the specific protection that was brought by knowing how far off the warring tribe was, or when the storm was coming resulted in keeping life and/or resources and continued health.

But the second, and I would argue more important way that information benefited those who sought it out was through pure power over less knowledgeable members of the community. Because being the person who is ‘in the know’ confers an almost magical ability to know what will happen next. And precognition has always been a highly valued ability, one which confers god-like status.

Knowledge is (still) power.

Fast forward and this is why trend forecasters (a most interesting, eclectic and intelligent bunch) are paid so well, and why heads of business and advertising (who are thought to know everything already) rely on these folks to plot next moves.

And so we have evolved as a species to crave information. But not just random facts, and not just specifically relevant information to our local weather patterns or coming events, though that can be useful. The most valuable information (that which we crave the most) is data about our community and the people in it. Once you understand that, you have figured out why Facebook is so damn successful. And why so many of us are attached to it. In an almost obsessive way. International news, political updates, and what comes in as news reporting is valuable in and of itself, but what we really crave is information about other people.

And why do we care so much about the minutae of other’s lives? Because human beings are social creatures, and are the incredibly successful species that we are because (despite wars at home and abroad) we work together. And the more we know about each other, the more successful we are, both as individuals and family groups (pure genetic selfishness) and also as a species.

So it makes sense that our brains are wired to be always focused on what those around us are doing and crave that information. It is inherent to our humanness. And if the Web helps us to do that, maybe all this information makes us MORE human (or helps us understand each other better, or communicate more effectively, as we have more information), which is why it’s so satisfying. And answers the questions of why our iPhones and other persuasive technologies have the power to alter our routines, and pull us in even when we need a good night’s rest. Or a morning’s snuggle with the kitties.

I do most of my best thinking with my hands poised above a keyboard; while I do still take notes by hand on occasion (reporting in the field!), I prefer not to. It’s slow, and as I write with a pen less and less, I find that my handwriting is devolving into a bit of a mess. Honestly, I’ve never taken too much pride in my penmanship, though whenever I read about how Jane Austen wrote her gorgeous novels with a pen and inkwell, blotting as she went, it does make me blush. I can only imagine I can write much faster (but certainly not as well!) as Jane, and that will have to do. (And what would Jane have created with more freedom and a laptop?)

But beyond the physical limitations of writing with a pen, I find that I actually feel a better sense of ‘flow’ while pounding away on a keyboard. Flow is that inexplicable thing that happens when time disappears and you are doing what you love or what fascinates; in my case writing. Others might find that next level through oil painting, rock climbing, equation-creation, architectural drawing, cooking, even housework if one were so inclined (I find some version of it when organizing my clothes).

So I do my best work when tethered by my tapping fingertips to a keyboard and computer. And I’ve wondered; does this make me some kind of cyborg, being taken over by a machine mind (or even, less bombastically, altering the way I think and what I create)? If I’m literally able to think more effectively because of a device not naturally part of me or easily created by my hands, does this make my work or my process less my own?

Thinking of Ms. Austen, and her well-known mania for revisions, how much time would she have saved if she had my Macbook? Would those hours saved have resulted in a different version of Pride and Prejudice? A whole new canon of work? Or would it have changed nothing at all?

Where does my writing end, and my technology begin? And is that changing me, my brain, or my work?

On one side, there have been studies proving that we think differently, using different parts of the brain when we type and when we hand-write.  According to a collection of studies reported on in ScienceDaily:

Brain imaging studies with adults have shown an advantage for forming letters over selecting or viewing letters. A brain imaging study at the University of Washington with children showed that sequencing fingers may engage thinking.

OK, so different parts of the brain are accessed when one types (selecting keys) as when writing (forming letters). Students who write by hand well, think better, both because they are more able to accurately take notes, but also because “research shows that when children are taught how to [write by hand], they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves,” according to this Newsweek article.

And certainaly there is a different relationship with the material when one writes or one types, due to it’s ‘realness.’ As a commenter on Productivity 501 says: “When we get to the end of a page [we've written], we have a tangible chunk of content that exists “for real”, instead of the virtual existence on a computer screen.”

So let’s continue handwriting (and teaching it to kids), to keep up the ability and to possibly access emotions or brain resources that we couldn’t otherwise. Emily Post recommends handwritten Thank You’s and lovers everywhere would prefer a scrawled note l’amour, or a painstakingly printed Valentine, right? (Though most of the loving natterings I have received have been via email, and are stored on a hard drive. I love that they look as fresh as the day they were sent. Though I’ve also broken up with people via text (but so has Britney, so it’s OK, right?) Wherever we are in human evolution, we still equate humanness with a written note, more or less so depending on our age, and comfort with typing, and of course, our romantic predilections.

Am I less ‘human’ because I prefer to type, to interact with a complex machine rather than nonmanipulable piece of paper, or just a different version of human? A newer one? Human 2.o?

The Extended Mind concept in philoshophy argues that I’m not less ‘natural’ for using a laptop to ‘think’ on, but that it is purely an extension of my brain. Like a hard drive is an extension of a computer. And that when I use, it, I’m actually creating something new.

This view proposes that some objects in the external environment are utilized by the mind in such a way that the objects can be seen as extensions of the mind itself. Specifically, the mind is seen to encompass every level of the cognitive process, which will often include the use of environmental aids.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who wrote the most significant paper in the field, The Extended Mind, argue that objects in our local environments can actually function as part of the brain. Instead of there being “the Brain” and then everything outside of it, their theory of active externalism maintains that the coupling between my brain, and say, my laptop, creates a wholly new system that’s not separate from the brain, but a part of a new system. They write, “[This] coupled system…can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right.”

This makes me think that instead of my brain being ‘taken over’ or ‘changed’ by the technology I’m using (at least in this scenario) perhaps it’s more like my brain is joining with another system to create a new system that’s more capable than the brain itself. A thing that is both new and ancient at the same time.

All of this doesn’t answer the question central to any artist or creative person though; does my use of this tool (which, really, is all the laptop is) fundamentally change the essence of the work I am able to do? Would I be able to think in the same way without the laptop?

I think that the answer has to be that yes, the tool I use changes the quality of my work. Just as any tool (a stick in the sand vs. a sharpened pencil) changes its result. Can you express the same things with different tools? Mostly, yes.  My work would be something different, something less influenced by technology. But since I’m writing about how technology affects our ability to understand our world and each other, I suppose it’s OK.

Our eyes see just a fraction of the light in the world.”

BUT

“It is very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.”

-Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD