Progress Daily

A quarter of a century ago, control of money was seen as both necessary and sufficient to curb inflation — so most central banks set monetary targets. Financial deregulation and innovation made the money supply harder to interpret. As the link between money and prices seemingly broke down, central banks scrapped money targets and instead focused on inflation directly.

America’s Federal Reserve has announced that it will stop publishing M3, its broadest measure of money. The Fed claims that M3 does not convey any extra information about the economy that is not already embodied in the narrower M2 measure. It is true that the two Ms move in step for much of the time, but there have been big divergences. Over the past year, for example, M3 has grown nearly twice as fast as M2.

As Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Monetary aggregates are a fickle guide to the economy over the next year, but over longer periods the link between money and prices still holds. Many big mistakes in economic history were made when policymakers ignored monetary signals: the Great Depression in the 1930s, the great inflation of the 1970s, and the financial bubbles in Japan in the late 1980s and East Asia in the late 1990s.

Research by the Bank for International Settlements has confirmed that monetary aggregates do still contain useful information. In particular, rapid growth in money and credit as well as asset prices usually signals the build-up of economic and financial imbalances, which often cause financial stress later on.

“Running on M3,” The Economist

Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centered state of mind. Anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration. One way to do this is with drugs such as amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. Caffeine also works. Modafinil, a drug licensed to treat narcolepsy, can keep a person awake and alert for 90 hours straight, with none of the jitteriness and bad concentration that amphetamines or coffee produce. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40 hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters with no ill effects.

The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people’s performance at school and at work. But kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks perform at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Breakfast of toast and beans boost children’s scores on a variety of cognitive tests. Beans are a good source of fiber, and research has shown a link between a high-fiber diet and improved cognition. The yeast extract in Marmite is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.

Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When healthy young adults are given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduces their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles.

Yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress. Supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.

Highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD to autism. Rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggle to find their way around mazes, and take longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.

Older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA (Omega 3) diet.

Rats fed on strawberries and blueberries have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, researchers measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training program, which involved tasks such as memorizing the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory. When the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent.

When researchers studied eight front runners in the annual World Memory Championships they did not find any evidence that these people have particularly high IQs or differently configured brains. But, while memorizing, these people did show activity in three brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks but are not normally active during simple memory tests. To remember the sequence of an entire pack of playing cards for example, the champions assign each card an identity, perhaps an object or person, and as they flick through the cards they can make up a story based on a sequence of interactions between these characters and objects at sites along a well-trodden route.

If you have been awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone who is legally drunk. Two or three late nights and early mornings in a row have the same effect. If you let someone who isn’t sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring sustained attention, such taking an exam.

Walking sedately for half an hour three times a week can improve abilities such as learning, concentration and abstract reasoning by 15 per cent. The effects are particularly noticeable in older people.

Schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam grades at age 10 or 11. The effect is strongest in boys.

Physical exercise promotes the growth of new brain cells. In mice, at least, the brain-building effects of exercise are strongest in the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory. This also happens to be the brain region that is damaged by elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

A study considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses. It concluded that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.

Researchers asked volunteers to spend 15 minutes a day thinking about exercising their biceps. After 12 weeks, their arms were 13 per cent stronger.

Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call.

Music can help as long as you listen to something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge.

“11 steps to a better brain,” NewScientist.com news service

Pairs of rats were housed together in cages with dividers down the middle. One of the rats in each pair had access to an OFF lever, but the other did not. Each time the cage was electrified, the rat in control turned off the shock for both. Though the 2 rodents received identical shocks, only the yoked rat showed signs of chronic stress: weight loss, ulcers, and increased susceptibility to cancer. (”Stressor controllability modulates stress-induced dopamine and serotonin efflux and morphine-induced serotonin efflux in the medial prefrontal cortex.”) The beneficial physiological and mental effects of controlling a stressor appear to come from dopamine. Individuals with high pain thresholds have more dopamine in their accumbens.

Satisfaction, by Gregory Berns

Until recently, most neuroscientists accepted as dogma the idea that neurogenesis does not occur in adults. But we know that cells in adult brains do divide, making neurons in the process. The new neurons are located in the parts of the brain most important for processing recently learned information and for laying down memories — the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

Sufferers of combat stress — “posttraumatic stress disorder” — have smaller hippocampi than normal, and the shrinkage increases with the length of combat exposure. Stress increases the level of corstisol in the brain, and cortisol is probably responsible for the shrinkage of the hippocampus. Patients with Cushing’s syndrome, in which too much cortisol is produced, also have smaller hippocampi. Stress is bad for the brain — except the particular brand of stress brought on by exercise.

Exercise protects the brain from sources of both physical and nonphysical stress. Feeling depressed? Exercise. Stressed out? Exercise!

Satisfaction, by Gregory Berns

Since the beginning of the modern international system, a succession of bids have been made for hegemony: the Habsburg Empire under Charles V, Spain under Philip II, France under Louis XIV as well as Napoleon, and Germany under Hitler (and, arguably, Wilhelm II). None of these attempts to gain hegemony succeeded.

The threat posed to their security by a rising hegemon has served as the catalyst for these candidates to adopt the necessary policies to mobilize their resources and transform their latent power into actual great-power capabilities. When France under Louis XIV briefly attained hegemony in Europe, both England and Austria rose from candidate status to great-power status and used their newly acquired capabilities to end France’s geopolitical preeminence. Similarly, England’s mid-nineteenth-century global preponderance spurred the United States, Germany, and Japan to emerge as great powers, largely to offset British supremacy.

Hegemons are defeated because other states in the international system, frequently spearheaded by newly emerged great powers, form counterbalancing coalitions against them. Thus, the English and the Dutch defeated Philip II. Various coalitions anchored by Holland, the newly emerged great powers of England and Austria, and an established great power in Spain undid Louis the XIV. A coalition composed of England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia rebuffed Napoleon’s bid for hegemony. Instead of war, the enervating economic effects of trying to maintain primacy against the simultaneous challenges of the United States, Russia, France, and Germany undermined British hegemony in the nineteenth century. The wartime grand alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union defeated Hitler.

The U.S. intervention in Kosovo crystallized fears of U.S. hegemony. As a result, an incipient anti-U.S. alliance comprising China, Russia, and India began to emerge. Each of these countries viewed the U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo as a dangerous precedent establishing Washington’s self-declared right to ignore the norm of international sovereignty and interfere in other states’ internal affairs. The three states increased their military cooperation, especially with respect to arms transfers and the sharing of military technology, and, like the Europeans, declared their support for a “multipolar” world.

With the onset of the Persian Gulf War, the United States began to manage the region’s security directly. The subsequent U.S. policy of “dual containment” — directed simultaneously against the region’s two strategic heavyweights, Iran and Iraq — underscored the U.S. commitment to maintaining its security interests through a hegemonic strategy. Because of its interest in oil, the U.S. is supporting regimes — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf emirates — whose domestic political legitimacy is contested. This makes the United States a lightning rod for those within these countries who are politically disaffected. Because these regimes are concerned about inflaming public opinion, both their loyalty and utility as U.S. allies are, to put it charitably, suspect.

Others have much greater intrinsic strategic interests in the Persian Gulf/Middle East than does the United States. For example, Western Europe, Japan, and, increasingly, China are far more dependent on the region’s oil than the United States. Because they live next door, Russia, China, Iran, and India have a much greater long-term security interest in regional stability in the Persian Gulf/Middle East than the United States. By passing the mantle of regional stabilizer to these great and regional powers, the United States could extricate itself from the messy and dangerous geopolitics of the Persian Gulf/Middle East and take itself out of radical Islam’s line of fire.

“Offshore Balancing Revisited” (pdf file) by Christopher Layne

Darwinian forces are multiple and sometimes contradictory. In a context where only a king can control enough food resources and labor supply to eat enough and do no physical labor so that he becomes fat prestige is conferred by signs of abundance. When junk food is cheap and poor women are fat, then it’s in to be thin.

Obesity researcher Jeffrey Sobal and Albert Stunkard reviewed 144 studies of the relation between socioeconomic status and weight. They found a strong inverse correlation between a woman’s weight and her social and economic status (the higher the status, the lower the weight) in Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States and virtually all developed countries. They found a relation every bit as strong in the opposite direction in developing countries with food scarcities. There the higher-status men and women were heavier. In the developed countries, the relation between status and weight was less consistent for men.

The thin ideal is maintained by the high in status through diet and exercise. It is also maintained by social mobility — thin women are more likely to “marry up,” to marry men who have higher social and economic status than their family of origin. Studies in the United States, Germany, Britain all find that upwardly mobile women are much thinner than their counterparts who marry men of the same social class or lower. There is also a genetic component. When identical twins overeat, they gain almost identical amounts of weight and tend to store it in the same regions.

Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff

At any given moment our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of information. Scientists have determined this by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from these cells to the brain. Our eyes alone receive and send over 10,000,000 signals to our brains each second. Scientists have also tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect different flashes of light, and tell apart different smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information a second.

In a study by Pawel Lewicki, Thomas Hill, and Elizabeth Bizot, the participant’s task was to watch a computer screen divided into four quadrants. On each trial, the letter X appeared in a quadrant, and the participant pressed one of four buttons to indicate which one. Unbeknownst to the participant, the presentations of the X’s were divided into blocks of 12 that followed a complex rule. For example, the X never appeared in the same square two times in a row; the third location depended on the location of the 2nd; the 4th location depended on the location of the preceding two trials; and an X never “returned” to its original location until it had appeared in a least two of the other squares. Although the exact rules were complicated, the participants appeared to learn them. As time went by their performance steadily improved, and they became faster and faster at pressing the correct button when the X appeared on the screen. Non of the participants, however, could verbalize what the rules were or even that they had learned anything.

The researchers suddenly changed the rules so that the clues predicting where the X would appear were no longer valid, and the participants’ performance deteriorated. Participants noticed that they could no longer do the task very well but none of them knew why.

Strangers to Ourselves — Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

Sara Lazar, a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, presented preliminary results last November that showed that the gray matter of 20 men and women who meditated for just 40 minutes a day was thicker than that of people who did not. Unlike in previous studies focusing on Buddhist monks, the subjects were Boston-area workers practicing a Western-style of meditation called mindfulness or insight meditation. You don’t have to do it all day for similar results. Meditation may slow the natural thinning of that section of the cortex that occurs with age.

The forms of meditation Lazar and other scientists are studying involve focusing on an image or sound or on one’s breathing. The practice seems to exercise the parts of the brain that help us pay attention. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has collaborated with the Dalai Lama to study the brains of Tibetan monks. Using caps with electrical sensors placed on the monks’ heads, Davidson has picked up unusually powerful gamma waves that are better synchronized in the Tibetans than they are in novice meditators. Studies have linked this gamma-wave synchrony to increased awareness.

Meditation may restore synapses, much like sleep but without the initial grogginess. Bruce O’Hara, associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky, had college students either meditate, sleep or watch TV. Then he tested them for what psychologists call psychomotor vigilance, asking them to hit a button when a light flashed on a screen. Those who had been taught to meditate performed 10% better — a huge jump, statistically speaking. Those who snoozed did significantly worse.

Studies say meditation also improves worker productivity, in large part by preventing stress-related illness and reducing absenteeism.

“How to Get Smarter, One Breath at a Time” by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin used an fMRI machine to map the brain of monk Matthieu Ricard. While Ricard, a monk with over 30 years’ experience in contemplative practice, engaged in what Buddhists call compassion meditation, Davidson measured the activity in his brain. The pictures showed excessive activity in the left prefrontal cortex (just inside the forehead) of Ricard’s brain, to a degree that far surpassed the other subjects measured.

Generally people with happy temperaments exhibit a high ratio of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area associated with happiness, joy and enthusiasm. Those who are prone to anxiety, fear and depression exhibit a higher ratio of activity in the right prefrontal cortex.

“Scientists Meditate on Happiness” by Kim Zetter

The mother’s level of testosterone influences the probability of having a boy or girl.

This potent chemical hormone has important effects on human bodies. Even tiny quantities can change the physical and psychological characteristics of both men and women. It also affects the way people behave. Since testosterone influences people’s behavior in known ways, it is possible to get an idea of a person’s testosterone levels by asking them about some of their characteristics. Thus it is quite feasible that a psychological test will indicate whether a mother will have a boy or a girl.

After war, more boys are born than usual, and, today, fewer boys are being born throughout the western world.

For every 100 baby girls, there are 106 baby boys. Nobody knows why. It’s a puzzle because other animal species have half male and half female offspring, and human males produce equal numbers of x-chromosome sperms (which make girls) and y-chromosome sperms (which make boys).

Women have only one tenth the amount of testosterone that men do. In both humans and animals, testosterone has been shown to be related to dominance. There is evidence to suggest that testosterone in women rises during periods of chronic stress — the sort of situation that arises in time of war, famine or disease. There are several documented examples of more boys being born in such circumstances.

Although the sex ratio averages out everywhere to 106 boys for every 100 girls, researchers have found that men in some occupational groups, such as airline pilots, astronauts, timber workers and deep sea divers, have a tendency to have more girls.

Dominant female deer have more male offspring than non-dominant deer; far more than would be expected by chance. A famous study describing this phenomenon was published in the top science journal Nature in 1984. Since then there have been more than forty animal studies published in reputable scientific journals documenting unusual sex ratios. For most animals living in the wild — different kinds of monkeys, wild horses and even whales — dominant mothers have more male offspring. When the animals were kept in captivity, however, the sex ratios sometimes ran in the opposite direction and the dominant females had more female offspring. Caging is likely to have an effect on both social hierarchies and hormones.

“The Sex Ratio”

Scientists have established that eggs taken from female mammals have varying levels of testosterone and that those with the highest levels are more likely to develop into male embryos.

Research by Valerie Grant has found that men with masculine jobs are more likely to produce girls.

A London School of Economics study found that engineers, actuaries and others with “systematising” brains tended to have sons.

“Why the tough girls tend to give birth to boys” by Roger Dobson and Steven Swinford