🧬 The Distilled Download - Aug 16

Greetings, fellow science nerds! 🤓 Here’s your latest installment of The Distilled Download.

I just got back from VeeCon in LA, where I attended a lot of “meh” talks, a couple of great ones, and saw Will.i.am use his latest AI tool to unknowingly spread misinformation about how quantum entanglement works to a room full of hundreds of people.

Will it hurt anyone? Probably not. But I find it both funny and sad that his demo of an otherwise really cool interactive AI voice bot and news service ended up being a great example of the dangers of relying on AI for accurate information about topics that are commonly misunderstood online (a.k.a “the training data”). Too bad I couldn’t get his attention afterward to complain.

And now.

The Download

☕ Why I’ll Keep Drinking Caffeine Before Morning Exercise
85% of Americans consume at least one caffeinated drink per day, but its health impacts–both good and bad–are still hotly debated. In this study, researchers gave female athletes either 0, 3mg/kg, or 6mg/kg caffeine before either morning or evening exercise. They found that the caffeine improved performance in the morning, but not the evening–and the higher dose in the morning did more! (For reference, that higher dose is ~4.5 cups of coffee)

These results make sense because in the afternoons and evenings, your body temperature is naturally higher, and you’re more “in gear” for high physical performance. It’s when most world records are set. So in the morning, caffeine jumpstarts you to that same “fully functioning” mode, but it doesn’t boost you above normal peak performance.

Of course these results were in athletes and habitual caffeine consumers, so it’s possible that us normal folk might get an even larger mental boost 🤷‍♂️.

🧑‍🦽 Amazing news for ALS Patients!
Four years ago, ALS patient Casey Harrell finally lost his ability to speak, after a long progression of neurodegeneration. Last year, researchers at the University of California implanted 4 electrode arrays in his brain, each containing 64 tiny spiky sensors that sank into the outer layer of the brain and measured electrical impulses from the neurons that fired when Casey tried to move his tongue, lips, and jaw to produce speech. AI software then interprets this combination of signals and tries to figure out what word he was attempting to say.

One day after the system was activated, it was recognizing 50 words with 99.6% accuracy. When the researchers published their results two days ago, they described how 8.4 months in, Casy was speaking with a 125,000-word vocabulary at 32 words per minute with a 97.5% accuracy!

Brain surgery is tough, but this same type of tech is also being used to tap into nerve endings in arms and legs to make pretty amazing functional prosthetics.

Sure, we may eventually serve our AI overlords, but in the meantime we’re just scratching the surface of ways that AI tech can improve people’s lives 🙂 

🎼 A Musical Mood Boost

We all know that listening to music can make you happy, but there’s lots of folklore surrounding the difference between classical music and other genres, as well as the role of musical preferences. A recent study out of China had people with no classical music listening history and played them either sad or happy music, and then another group listened to normal music they were familiar with but either really liked or were more indifferent to.

They found that when people with depression listened to music they liked, there was visible activation in a brain network involving the auditory cortex and two regions of the brain’s reward circuitry involved in mood regulation and pleasure (the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc)).

They concluded that:

But what was really cool is that, for those who didn’t experience a benefit, they were able to modulate the sound by incorporating specific frequencies that lead to greater activation of these brain regions and lowering of depressive symptoms! The study was small, but an interesting launching point for more research.

Recent Video Highlight

How To Learn Anything Faster: The 85% Rule – This is a fundamental part of how the human brain learns new skills and information, validated across a wide range of disciplines. I try to incorporate it into my own practice whenever I’m learning anything new.

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