Why is it often so hard to get off the couch and go to the gym? While you can certainly point to your lack of will power for the inaction, you can also blame evolution for this predicament. Your brain prefers to minimize effort because that's how it's been trained to do it for millennia.
Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG) in Switzerland came to this conclusion after studying the neuron activity of people who had the choice of either engaging in physical activity or doing nothing. The researchers found that it takes much more effort for the brain to escape its general tendency to put forth less effort.
This battle in the mind comes courtesy of our ancestors who aimed to do less to increase the likelihood they would survive. Expending unnecessary energy would have made them more vulnerable to predators or environmental factors. Conserving energy was helpful when competing against rivals, fighting, hunting for prey, and searching for food. Living in modern societies does not require this approach, and yet the predilection of our brains to work less persists.
To gain a better understanding, the scientists based their hypothesis on "the physical activity paradox." You've experienced it if you've ever done something like buying a membership to a gym that you attend with less frequency each passing week. This happens when the conflict between your reason-based knowledge (going to the gym is good for my health) runs into the automatic system based on affect, which is, in this case, all the hurt and tiredness you expect to get out of the physical activity. The result is often paralysis—you remain sedentary.
To delve deeper into what is taking place at the neuronal level, the researchers studied the brain activity of 29 people who desired to be more active in their everyday lives but had a hard time doing so. The subjects were made to choose between physical activity or inactivity as the researchers observed their brains using an electroencephalograph (EEG) with 64 electrodes.
The research team was headed by Boris Cheval from the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE and HUG and Matthieu Boisgontier from Leuven University, Belgium, and the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Cheval explained how the experiment, where subjects controlled an online avatar, was carried out:
We made participants play the "manikin task," which involved steering a dummy towards images representing a physical activity and subsequently moving it away from images portraying sedentary behaviour [...] They were then asked to perform the reverse action.
The scientists looked at how long it took the participants to get near the sedentary image versus avoiding it and found that it took the subjects 32 milliseconds less to move away from the less active image. Cheval called this result "considerable for a task like this." While such an outcome didn't correspond to their theory of the physical activity paradox at first glance, it actually ended up confirming it.
This animation shows the experiment the participants were asked to perform, moving the avatar closer or farther from the image shown.
Credit: UBC Media Relations
It turned out that the reason for why the participants moved their avatar away from images of physical inactivity and towards active pictures more quickly is because avoiding lazy images forced their brains to work harder. That's due to the fact that the participants wanted to engage in physical activity even if they weren't doing so. Choosing more active images was actually easier to do. As such, the EEG scans suggested that their brains were essentially hardwired towards laziness.
Matthieu Boisgontier explained why evolution preferred the easy way out:
Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators. [...] The failure of public policies to counteract the pandemic of physical inactivity may be due to brain processes that have been developed and reinforced across evolution.
He thinks one big takeaway from the study is that the brain has to work hard to avoid physical activity. The team's research will next focus on whether the brain can be re-trained.
Check out the new study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, here.
The first two episodes of the Netflix documentary series Rotten touch upon important issues in our relationship to food. The first focuses on the dangers of colony collapse in bee populations as well as international companies filling bottles with ingredients that definitely are not honey. The second deals with food allergies, particularly focused on the largest: peanuts.
While these are distinct issues, two themes weave these stories together. First, the impact of our environment on health. Humans have gone to great lengths to separate from nature. Yet we interact with whatever environment we live within. Effects of sedentary existences lived apart from the planet’s rhythms include the slow destruction of our bodies and pretty much every species we come into contact with.
The booming almond industry needs pollinators, which stressed beekeepers (and bees) travel hundreds or thousands of miles to accomplish in California’s central valley each season—adding to the stress. Colony collapse is rampant given the diseases these nomadic bees are now sharing. This is but one example of interdependence that we often overlook. No pollination, no honey, no almonds, no—a lot.
The rapid onset of food allergies over the course of only one generation provides another example of our exile from nature’s rhythms. We would never eat foods apart from the environment they were grown or captured within until recently. Industrial monocultures are likely, at least in part, to blame for this stunning increase in any or all of the eight allergens, which leads us to the second theme in these episodes: our microbiome.
These 8 foods make up 90% of all food allergies in the U.S. Image: Fix.com
Our microbiome also directly interacts with our environment. While Purell has proven beneficial for soldiers in foreign territories, constantly sanitizing your hands weakens your immune system when in home territory. Synopsis: let your kids play in dirt. You play in dirt too. Those bacteria are strengthening.
Yet we have many weird relationships with our environment and the foods we eat, often in the invented cause of “purity.” One example is juicing, heralded as the perfect (and profitable) “cleansing” mechanism. Drink juice for five or ten days and your body “resets.” But juice is no different than soda, as you’ve removed the most beneficial part of the fruit: fiber.
We’ve long known fiber is essential to our diet, in order to “get things moving.” Otherwise known as roughage, dietary fiber is comprised of soluble and insoluble fiber. Both play critical roles in defecation. While too much fiber can cause intestinal gas and bloating, too little, a hallmark of a highly processed diet heavy on sugar, means we’ll turn to laxatives instead of eating the fruits, plants, and grains that offer an abundance of it.
Fiber also reduces the risk of heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes, and has been shown to lower mortality rates. But its role in digestion is particularly important. The food we consume is broken down by enzymes, its nutrients absorbed by our intestines. The molecules we cannot absorb, fiber, either pass through or, as it turns out, become food for gut microbes.
A recent study published in Cell Host and Microbe investigates mice on a low-fiber, high-fat diet. The gut bacterial population crashed, triggering immune reactions. A similar experiment, published in the same journal, discovers that the effects of a low-fiber diet are wide-ranging:
Along with changes to the microbiome, both teams also observed rapid changes to the mice themselves. Their intestines got smaller, and its mucus layer thinner. As a result, bacteria wound up much closer to the intestinal wall, and that encroachment triggered an immune reaction.
Continuation of this diet causes chronic inflammation; the mice also got fatter and developed high blood sugar. In both cases, the inclusion of a fiber called inulin dramatically improved their health and gut bacteria population. The researchers, which include Georgia State University’s Andrew T. Gewirtz, realized that fiber serves as an essential food for an entire population of bacteria.
"One way that fiber benefits health is by giving us, indirectly, another source of food, Dr. Gewirtz said. Once bacteria are done harvesting the energy in dietary fiber, they cast off the fragments as waste. That waste — in the form of short-chain fatty acids — is absorbed by intestinal cells, which use it as fuel," writes Carl Zimmer for The New York Times.
The “peaceful coexistence” of bacteria in the microbial system is disturbed on a low-fiber diet. Famine breaks out. Bacteria dependent upon fiber starve, followed by the bacteria that depend upon them for sustenance. A colony collapse. What follows isn’t a disappearance, but an aggravation.
"Inflammation can help fight infections, but if it becomes chronic, it can harm our bodies. Among other things, chronic inflammation may interfere with how the body uses the calories in food, storing more of it as fat rather than burning it for energy," writes Zimmer.
Obesity isn’t the only thing fiber fights. It is also believed to help combat or prevent immune disorders. A fiber supplement probably won’t cut it, however, since what our microbiome truly craves is a variety of fiber sources, which, fortunately, can be found in the produce aisle.
We begin life with a disadvantage regarding fiber. In his book, Catching Fire, British primatologist Richard Wrangham writes that our relatively small colon means we cannot utilize plant fiber nearly as effectively as great apes. Cooked food provides an important means for intaking more fiber (and other nutrients) than raw plants, but thing is, we have to eat those plants.
A diet filled with processed foods and fiber supplements is not going to cut it. Our microbiome craves what it has evolved to need in order to survive. Without those requirements those bacteria perish, initiating system-wide havoc in our bodies. Sans fiber we’re not honoring the environment that gave birth to us, and that environment is certainly speaking back.
--
Derek Beres is the author of Whole Motion: Training Your Brain and Body For Optimal Health. Based in Los Angeles, he is working on a new book about spiritual consumerism. Stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s not quite time travel, but scientists appear to have reversed the arrow of time in quantum systems. The “arrow of time” is the concept that natural processes run forward, not in reverse. An international team of researchers was able to show that given specific conditions, heat can flow from a cold quantum particle to one that’s hotter.
The arrow of time is derived from the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy increases over time. Entropy is the measure of disorder. The law explains why it’s hard to unbreak stuff or why a hot cup of tea will eventually turn cold. It just doesn’t usually work the other way.
What the scientists found is that “the arrow of time is not an absolute concept, but a relative concept,” as says the study’s co-author Eric Lutz, a theoretical physicist at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. His lab was able to reverse the flow of heat in two quantum particles. They were correlated, meaning that their properties were linked, similarly to quantum entanglement but less strong. The special quality of correlated particles is that they share some information with each other. This property is not possible for bigger objects.
The researchers, led by the physicist Roberto Serra from the Federal University of ABC in Santo André, Brazil, manipulated molecules of chloroform. These are made of carbon, hydrogen and chlorine atoms.
The scientists heated up the nucleus of the hydrogen atom more than the nucleus of the carbon and observed how the energy flowed. In an uncorrelated state, the heat flowed as expected, from hot to cold. But when the nuclei became correlated, heat flowed backwards with the hotter hydrogen nucleus getting hotter and the cooler carbon getting cooler.
The significance of the experiment lies in demonstrating an exception to the second law of thermodynamics, which doesn’t take into account correlated particles.
While odd behavior at the quantum level may be hard to grasp, what is more tangibly exciting is that the scientists are aiming to use these particle quirks to design super-small quantum engines.
You can read their study here.
