Isegoria

In the UK, the average level of myopia is between 20% and 30%, and 20–30% was once the average among people in South East Asia as well, Australian National University Professor Ian Morgan explains — until recently:

“They’ve gone from something like 20% myopia in the population to well over 80%, heading for 90% in young adults, and as they get adult it will just spread through the population. It certainly poses a major health problem.”

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Professor Morgan argues that many children in South East Asia spend long hours studying at school and doing their homework. This in itself puts pressure on the eyes, but exposure to between two and three hours of daylight acts as a counterbalance and helps maintain healthy eyes.

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“We’re talking about the need for two to three hours a day of outdoor light — it doesn’t have to be massively sunny, we think the operating range is 10-20,000 lux, we’re not sure about that — but that’s perfectly achievable on a cloudy day in the UK.”

Harvard psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke pioneered infant gaze studies, which have taught us that infants understand objects, and they can sort-of count:

Show infants arrays of, say, 4 or 12 dots and they will match each number to an accompanying sound, looking longer at the 4 dots when they hear 4 sounds than when they hear 12 sounds, even if each of the 4 sounds is played comparatively longer. Babies also can perform a kind of addition and subtraction, anticipating the relative abundance of groups of dots that are being pushed together or pulled apart, and looking longer when the wrong number of dots appears.

Infants also have some sense of geometry:

Infants and toddlers use geometric clues to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, navigate through rooms and locate hidden treasures. Is the room square or rectangular? Did the nice cardigan lady put the Slinky in a corner whose left wall is long or short?

At the same time, the Spelke lab discovered, young children are quite bad at using landmarks or décor to find their way. Not until age 5 or 6 do they begin augmenting search strategies with cues like “She hid my toy in a corner whose left wall is red rather than white.”

“That was a deep surprise to me,” Dr. Spelke said. “My intuition was, a little kid would never make the mistake of ignoring information like the color of a wall.” Nowadays, she continued, “I don’t place much faith in my intuitions, except as a starting place for designing experiments.”

More recently, she and her colleagues have been studying infant social intelligence:

Katherine D. Kinzler, now of the University of Chicago, and Kristin Shutts, now at the University of Wisconsin, have found that infants just a few weeks old show a clear liking for people who use speech patterns the babies have already been exposed to, and that includes the regional accents, twangs, and R’s or lack thereof. A baby from Boston not only gazes longer at somebody speaking English than at somebody speaking French; the baby gazes longest at a person who sounds like Click and Clack of the radio show “Car Talk.”

In guiding early social leanings, accent trumps race. A white American baby would rather accept food from a black English-speaking adult than from a white Parisian, and a 5-year-old would rather befriend a child of another race who sounds like a local than one of the same race who has a foreign accent.

Other researchers in the Spelke lab are studying whether babies expect behavioral conformity among members of a group (hey, the blue character is supposed to be jumping like the rest of the blues, not sliding like the yellow characters); whether they expect other people to behave sensibly (if you’re going to reach for a toy, will you please do it efficiently rather than let your hand meander all over the place?); and how babies decide whether a novel object has “agency” (is this small, fuzzy blob active or inert?).

Naturally New York Times readers are expected to know Click and Clack from NPR’s weekend “Car Talk” show. (Click and Clack, by the way, are MIT grads, and their offices are in Harvard Square.)

Apparently your answer to this non-theological question predicts whether you’re a religious believer or disbeliever:

If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

If you answered $10, you probably followed your gut, and you’re an intuitive thinker. If you answered $5, you stopped and thought things through, and you’re an analytical thinker — or you’ve seen the question before.

Psychologists William Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, predicted that intuitive thinkers would be more likely to be religious than analytical thinkers:

Their study of 179 Canadian undergraduate students showed that people who tend to solve problems more analytically also tended to be religious disbelievers. This was demonstrated by giving the students a series of questions like the one above and then scoring them on the basis of whether they used intuition or analytic logic to reach the answers. Afterward, the researchers surveyed the students on whether or not they held religious beliefs. The results showed that the intuitive thinkers were much more likely to believe in religion.

To test whether there is a causative basis for this correlation, the researchers then used various subtle manipulations to promote analytic reasoning in test subjects. Prior research in psychology has shown that priming stimuli that subconsciously suggest analytical thinking will tend to increase analytic reasoning measured on a subsequent test. For example, if subjects are shown a picture of Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker” (seated head-in-hand pondering) they score higher in measures of analytic thinking in tests given immediately afterward. Their studies confirmed this effect but also showed that those subjects who showed increased analytic thinking also were significantly more likely to be disbelievers in religion when surveyed immediately after the test.

Three other interventions to boost analytic thinking had the same effect on increasing religious disbelief. This included asking subjects to arrange a collection of words into a meaningful sequence. If the words used for the subconscious prime related to analytic thinking, such as “think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational,” rather than control words “hammer, shoes, jump, retrace, brown,” subjects scored higher on tests of analytic thinking given immediately afterward, and they were also much more likely to be disbelievers in religion. This demonstrates that increasing critical thinking also increases religious disbelief.

Perception can boost performance in peculiar ways:

As director of the Action-Modulated Perception Lab at Purdue, [Dr. Jessical Witt had] previously demonstrated that for successful tennis players and field-goal kickers, the ball or goal looks larger than it does to players not enjoying a hot streak. Success, for these athletes, had changed how they perceived the field of action.

But, Dr. Witt wondered, could you turn that situation around and induce a performance-enhancing effect? Could you, by making the ball or goal seem larger, make people perform better? Or, by making it look smaller, would you cause people to do worse?

To test the question, she turned to golf. Basketball hoops are difficult to manipulate. They’re up too high.

So she set up a putting green, with a standard-size golf hole at the top of a slight incline. In the ceiling, she mounted a projector that beamed a series of dark circles around the hole, surrounding it like beads on a necklace. In one image, these projected circles were smaller than the actual hole. In the other, they were larger.

Dr. Witt then had 36 volunteers view the hole from a few feet away, with and without the encircling projections, and “draw” on a computer screen their perception of the hole’s size using a digital drawing program.

Most of them perceived the hole to be larger than it actually was if smaller circles surrounded it, and smaller than life if it had bigger circles all around it.

When the volunteers subsequently putted, they landed more attempts when the hole was surrounded by little circles and seemed oversize to them. They missed more often when putting to the hole that, girded by larger circles, appeared shrunken.

Throughout, the actual size of the hole never changed.

“This finding was in some ways quite unexpected,” Dr. Witt says. It might seem obvious that a bigger-seeming target would invite success. But the reverse easily could be true, she says. A wider-seeming target could prompt wider shots. Reality would have betrayed you in that case, and you’d miss.

Or your perceptions might have no effect on performance. In an interesting study from 2004, when treadmill runners were told that they were striding at an easier pace than, in fact, they were, their bodies shrugged off the lie. The runners reported feeling exactly as tired as they would have felt running at their true pace, not at the pace they thought they were maintaining. Their lungs and legs weren’t fooled, even if the mind was.

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“We suspect that a bigger target makes people feel more confident in their ability” to hit it, she says. And greater confidence typically results in better performance. She and her colleagues did not assess confidence levels in this experiment, she says, though they plan to do so in follow-up work.

Targeting may have contributed to larger brains in humans.

The ability to locate a target with the gaze and perform an aiming movement that places an object consistently on or near that target may be uniquely human. This is the thesis of William Calvin (1983), who states that humans throughout time have exhibited a fascination with targeting that is not found to the same degree in primates. Although primates may display some rudimentary targeting abilities — for example, they use rocks to open nuts or other sources of food — they never spend countless hours throwing at a far target just for the fun of it. Aiming at targets is a pursuit of many humans around the world, young and old, male and female, high and low skilled. Children will throw rocks at targets for hours, and adults continue to engage in targeting activities throughout their lifetime. Indeed, many adults make this their profession, as is the case with professional athletes in basketball, golf, ice hockey, and soccer, to name but a few sports where hitting targets with a high degree of accuracy is important.

Calvin states that aiming to hit targets led to the development of the bigger human brain. He explains that our ancestors first discovered how to hit food targets with rocks and passed this knowledge down from generation to generation. A hunter throwing at a distance is a lot safer than one close in, so special targeting implements were developed. Targeting implements evolved from those held in the hand (stones, knives), to those thrown (spears), to those propelled over great distances using bows and arrows, to rifles and missiles. A small human can fell a very large animal if the right target is hit (the heart or another vital organ) with the right implement.

As advances in targeting occurred, Calvin states that the temporal and frontal lobes developed to levels not seen in primates or other species. Of course, modern humans do not have to hunt for food, so targeting in this sense is no longer required. Instead, we have developed complex sport and computer games that stimulate and challenge the human mind to be accurate and consistent.

Humans have evolved all manner of targeting pursuits that require the placing of objects in or on specific locations, most often under difficult conditions. As mentioned, sport is one of the main arenas where this occurs. Think of the targets in golf, basketball, darts, bowling, sky diving, ski racing, kayaking through gates, hitting a receiver, playing the piano, and video games. These activities all contain targets of some kind. It often takes many years of practice to be good at a targeting activity. Furthermore, in order for a targeting skill to find a place in a sport, it has to be challenging for most humans to perform. The best field shooters in basketball hit only 50% of their field shots (or chance), the best shooters in ice hockey or soccer rarely score more than once each game, and the best golfers still take 1.8 putts each hole.

The so-called Tommy John surgery keeps pitchers in the game, but it doesn’t address the underlying biomechanical flaw in their technique:

Thirty-seven baseball seasons have passed since orthopedic surgeon Frank Jobe performed the first UCL reconstruction on Dodgers southpaw Tommy John, whose name would become synonymous with the procedure. [...] Jobe’s procedure soon proved so successful that it became the norm. Today, about 50 active major league pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery — around one in seven.

Despite the inevitable yearlong stint on the DL that rehab from the surgery requires, teams and pitchers seem to barely flinch at the diagnosis of a compromised UCL. “It’s become an accepted side effect of the job,” says George Paletta, the Cardinals’ head team physician and orthopedic surgeon. That’s because the surgery works; 92 percent of elite pitchers with reconstructed UCLs return to their prior level of competition for at least a year.

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Problems usually begin below the waist. The most telling moment in a pitcher’s delivery, for instance, is the foot strike. When the foot makes contact with the mound, the pitching arm must be up and ready to throw. A righthanded pitcher should be showing the baseball to the shortstop, a lefty to the second baseman. (Among active hurlers, Cliff Lee is a good example.) But if a pitcher’s elbows come higher than his wrists and shoulders, with the ball pointing down, he’s demonstrating an “inverted W” — a sign that his sequence is off and he’s fighting his own body. Such poor timing leads to arm lag, evident when the throwing elbow trails the shoulder once the shoulders square to home plate. Strasburg exhibits both problems, forcing him and others like him to rely more on the arm’s relatively small muscles instead of the more massive ones in the legs and torso. Throw after throw, the shoulder and elbow are under extra stress. The higher the pitch’s velocity and the worse the flaw, the more the arm suffers. And the more a pitcher throws, the worse it gets.

Arm lag and improper sequencing were likely to blame for Strasburg’s UCL tear, as well as for those of almost everyone else knocked out by the injury. “The timing is subtle,” says the American Sports Medicine Institute’s Glenn Fleisig, who has analyzed more than 2,000 pitchers and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on pitching biomechanics. “It’s the difference between good and great and healthy and injury-waiting-to-happen.”

A.J. Jacobs recently became aware of just how loud our world is — and how this secondhand smoke of our ears harms us:

What’s the problem with this high-decibel world? “The most obvious one is hearing loss,” Dr. Bronzaft says. Some 26 million adults are walking around with noise-induced hearing loss, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Noise also has a surprisingly potent effect on our stress level, cardiovascular system and concentration. In Paleo times, a loud noise signaled a threat, so noise triggers the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure.

A University of British Columbia review of 6,300 people who work in noisy jobs found that they suffer two to three times more heart problems than those who work in quiet settings. A former World Health Organization official estimates (with a bit of alarmism) that noise-induced strain may cause 45,000 deadly heart attacks a year.

Noise also wreaks havoc on the brain. Dr. Bronzaft conducted a landmark study at a public school in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, published in the journal Environment and Behavior in 1975. Some of the classrooms directly faced an elevated subway track. Every five minutes the students heard a train rattle by. Other classrooms were tucked on the opposite side of the building, away from the noise. The difference? By the sixth grade, the kids on the noisy side were nearly a year behind. Since then, her conclusions about the effects of noise on concentration have been backed up by a pile of other studies, on both students and adults.

After meeting Dr. Bronzaft, I pledged to turn down the volume on my own life. I started in my kids’ room. I dug out all of their beeping, yammering electronic toys and spent a half-hour putting masking tape over the plastic speakers

“What are you doing, Daddy?” asked my son Zane. “Just fixing the broken toys,” I half-lied.