As a studious avoider of spoilers I’m not sure I’m buying this, but research suggests that spoilers don’t spoil anything (note that the link has a big Harry Potter spoiler at the top of the article, those bastards!). (thx david)

We’ve all heard of Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment that showed people are willing to torture other people when ordered to by authority figures, but we don’t often hear about his subjects who refused orders.

Very interesting piece from Errol Morris on unknown unknowns, The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is, but here’s the juicy bit:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

“But I wore the juice” is now my new catchall excuse for my own stupidity.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror nicely summarizes a great episode of This American Life, Ruining It for the Rest of Us. Conventional wisdom says that group dynamics trump the individual, but sociology professor Will Felps’ work suggests one bad apple can be surprisingly damaging. In his experiments, groups with one bad apple were up to 30-40% less effective than the untainted bushels.

Interesting article at The Economist applying the Dunbar number to Facebook.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

(via waxy)

Nice little piece in The NY Times on the importance of relaxation to performance. They site the Michael Phelps example, of course, but I'd point to the Usain Bolt/Asafa Powell example as the more glaring one. As Anthony Lane put it in his opening paragraph to his excellent piece on the Olympics:

The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track, and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to do--the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small boy in need of a pee. Bolt's nerves were less twitchy than that. Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive for rum and Coke.

Lane's first article is even better. Read 'em both (although it's a bit after-the-fact now).

This is something I've touched on in a few other posts, but I thought it was worth calling out on it's own.

It feels like I've often heard sentiments like "do it for 3 weeks and it will get easier" or "six weeks is the magic number, and after that it's a habit."

Hogwash.

I have an exercise habit now, but looking back I think it took me roughly TWO YEARS to cultivate. Two years of forcing myself to do it. Sure, it got gradually easier over time, but there were many days, weeks, even months where it took just as much effort to force myself into the gym as it did in the first few weeks. As for diet, I'm over three months into this "no sugar" thing, and I'm certain the bulk of the journey is still ahead of me. Again, the Leptin stuff is interesting). Plus, if you plotted me on The Big Bell Curve of American Fitness when I started all this a few years ago, I was already in pretty good shape! I was an athlete turned weekend warrior striving to reclaim my dormant (but not lost) athleticism. And it was still damn hard to form the habits. Imagine if I spent my first 30 years on the couch instead?

Anyway, I'm sure the intentions behind the whole "it'll get easier in a few weeks" claims are good; you want to encourage people by giving them a light at the end of the tunnel. But what happens in a few weeks, when it's still bloody hard? Discouragement, backsliding, plan abandonment. I say, tell 'em it's going to take years of hard work, and then maybe, if you're lucky, it'll be a habit. If nothing else, it's the truth.

From The Olfactory Lives of Primates by Robert M. Sapolsky (Virginia Quarterly Review, not online):

For sensory systems, how many steps does it take to get from the eye, ear, or path of skin to that emotional limbic system. Roughly ten steps. Take vision. First there's a layer of neurons in the cortex that breaks the visual scene into dots, then a next layer turning the dots into lines, then collections of lines, on and on. Finally, an Ice Age later, by a neuron's temporal standard, visual information trickles to the limbic system, and you activate an emotional response appropriate to seeing the face of someone intent on, say, seducing you or ethnically cleansing you. All of the sensory systems, that is, except olfaction. How many steps from smelling something to the limbic system? Just one.

See also: NY Times article on smell.

Pretty interesting read over at Powering Muscles: 10 Ways to Train Your Brain for Better Performance:

The best evidence that muscle fatigue starts in the brain comes from studies involving sensors that measure electrical activity in the muscles. The amount of electrical activity in the muscles is a direct indicator of how hard the brain is driving them to perform work. In a recent French study, researchers found that an involuntary drop in performance during repeated bicycling sprints was accompanied by a comparable decline in electrical activity in the muscles. These results clearly showed that fatigue was not caused by acid buildup or any other factor within the muscles themselves. Instead, it was caused by reduced drive from the brain.

There is no spoon.

Bonus link: over at Salon a writer decided to give Charles Atlas' 1922 "Dynamic Tension" course a go. You know, the one you saw advertised in comic books as a kid? Pretty funny stuff. Not all crazy (but some very crazy).

I've wondered before (although perhaps not on this weblog, can't remember) how much of all medicine rests on the placebo effect. How many treatments would simply stop working if the placebo effect were suddenly erased from our minds? Consider this, from the article 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense:

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

Stop reading now if you don't want me to ruin certain treatments for you, because faith is everything...

Still here? Okay... I was discussing this with my neuromuscular therapist friend yesterday, and she mentioned a few interesting studies, one which showed that of the "alternative" pain management techniques, acupuncture appeared to be the most effective. However, another study showed that fake acupuncture (sticking in needles randomly?) is pretty much just as effective as real acupuncture. Did some Googling, found a bunch of references, but I particularly liked this one: Sham Acupuncture More Effective Than Sugar Pill in Easing Arm Pain.

First question that leaps to mind: what do you use as a control group if you're studying the placebo effect? :-)

Jason Kottke has a fun post up listing a variety of ways in which people with poor self-awareness (among other traits) are better off: Better Living Through Self Deception. Many of the notions he touches on relate to the mental aspect of sport either tangentially or directly. If nothing else, I have learned that he really sucked at WMO. Hey, I feel better already!

Podium Sports Journal looks good, and I liked the piece titled, "The Nine Mental Skills of a Successful Athlete." The thing I particularly liked was his definition of a successful athlete:

What these athletes have in common is that their sport is important to them and they're committed to being the best that they can be within the scope of their limitations - other life commitments, finances, time, and their natural ability. They set high, realistic goals for themselves and train and play hard. They are successful because they are pursuing their goals and enjoying their sport. Their sport participation enriches their lives and they believe that what they get back is worth what they put into their sport.