Once more, how to improve your brain. The oil spill is burning. Earth Day was green — like money.
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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE ABOUT COGNITIVE DECLINE. The National Institutes of Health held one of its Consensus Conferences this week, an attempt to correlate all the information about the causes, prevention, and treatment of a disorder and issue recommendations. In this case it was Alzhimer's disease, and in this case the assembled experts issued no recommendations except the ever-popular calls for more research. Several of them.
That's because, they said, not enough is known about what causes this calamitous deterioration of the brain and how it can be forestalled. Yet figuring out these things asap is crucial for the future of the US health care system, to say nothing of the future of families who must deal with a devastating burden.
NIH pulled out all the stops, making video of the meeting available, issuing a detailed, useful, and unusually lengthy press release, holding a press conference.
Hardly anybody noticed.
Knight Science Journalism Tracker Paul Raeburn did a nice job of taking on journalists for ignoring this story — and taking on bloggers who did limp and inadequate work on it. He notes:
Still, this is a major illness, and one that aging members of the mainstream media presumably have at least a passing personal interest in. And when a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health concludes we don't know how to prevent it, that's news. Or it should be. Especially because many entrepreneurs (I use that word euphemistically) have claimed that they can help you prevent Alzheimer's.
So why this puzzling silence, following on silence also about the recent paper on the failures of online games to improve overall cognition, which was discussed here last week? I can make some guesses, partly based on my own experiences during the past decade of writing about brain improvement techniques and why they don't seem to work. And trying, unsuccessfully, to get more assignments to write about it.
One is that editors (and maybe science writers as well) don't quite believe that no puzzles, no drugs, no vitamin, mineral, or whatsit out there has been proven to help people think better — even when that discouraging conclusion is backed by Authority. Editors have argued with me about this even when I was waving respectable references at them. I don't know whether that's because they don't want it to be true or whether brain improvement industry marketing has been so successful. Or it may be that the latter has been so successful because of the former; we seem to be predisposed to believe that there are established techniques for brain improvement.
Also, negative results are published much less frequently than positive ones. This is certainly true in the clinical literature. We discover nearly every time a blockbuster wonder drug is found to be not so wonderful after all that negative findings about it have been languishing unpublished in researchers' files.
I suspect not all of this nonpublication is a conspiracy to hide unfavorable findings. I suspect there is a part of human nature that is more interested in something that works than in something that doesn't. That certainly seems to be true of some editors. If it works, it's news. If it doesn't, it's not.
And then there's the hope factor. We live in hope. The faith that something marvelous — or at least better — lies just around the corner keeps us putting one foot in front of the other.
Years ago I interviewed the author of a much-ballyhooed study of cognitive improvement in Alzheimer's disease. The study reported that people who pursued lots of leisure-time activities — including playing games and working puzzles — were much less likely to develop the disease than those who didn't, or those who watched lots of television.
MSM interpreted the research to mean that being active staves off Alzheimer's disease. But an equally plausible interpretation is that people whose brains are already in good shape stay active into old age. The scientific paper itself mentioned this hypothesis prominently, and it is backed up by other research (for example, the famous Nun Study) showing that people who eventually are diagnosed with Alzheimer's began displaying subtle symptoms as early as their 20s. In short, playing games and puzzling may not be the cause of a healthy brain, but the consequence of it.
So how do we tell which, cause or consequence? "There's no way to know," the lead author told me. In fact, he pointed out, it might even be both. But until the question was truly settled, he was happy to have people think that they should Use It or Lose It. He said:
I believe cause is the more reasonable hypothesis because it's something we can do something about. In medicine, it's better to be wrong and help the patient than do nothing. We're not concerned primarily with what's absolutely true, just what might help.
Wow.
SPILL, BABY, SPILL. THEN BURN, BABY, BURN. We regret to inform you that the US Department of the Interior, self-proclaimed protector of the nation's natural resources and overseer of oil drilling on public land and offshore, has canceled an important event scheduled for next week. The event was a ceremony presenting the agency's annual award for exemplary safety and environmental management by offshore oil industry operators.
The agency said it had to cancel the ceremony because it is too busy dealing with the consequences of the explosion that killed 11 people and sank the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon off the Louisiana coast last week.
One of the finalists for the safety and environmental management award was BP, the huge oil company that operated said drilling rig.
The oil spill, it is bruited, could be worse than the Exxon Valdez event. As I write, the explosion's cause is still unknown, but the leak is believed to be 5000 barrels per day and the slick on the ocean is now greater than the size of Rhode Island.
The Great Beyond has been posting roundups. David Biello at SciAm's Observations compares the spill to other such disasters and points out that it could leave President Obama's plans to revive offshore drilling "in dire straits." Pun intended?
At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin explains why burning is an effective way to deal with the oil spill. At the Christian Science Monitor, Adam Hadhazy describes technology being used to track and contain the spill, and how the spill might prove to be a testing ground for new approaches to containment.
At Climate Progress, Joe Romm summarizes how every branch of the US government is swinging into investigative action. Marcus Baram describes the oil industry's successful campaign to forestall new safety rules in the Huffington Post.
SEVERAL DAYS LATE, BUT NOT SHORT OF DOLLARS. Speaking of the environment, I skipped Earth Day last week, partly because both the MSM and bloggers were full of it and partly because time, while of the essence, was short. But this week you might look at Brett Norman's take on media treatment of Earth Day at The Observatory, Columbia Journalism Review blog. Or you could just read the hed, which says it all: "Green Like Money."
