Movement and creativity

According to Scientific American, “Movement and creativity go hand in hand.” This is news to me, but apparently creative people have found this to be true. A musician speaks of writing music while on the hiking trail; an author finds running essential to her writing practice. Apparently, Beethoven, Henry David Thoreau, Maya Angelou, and Joyce Carol Oates have also combined movement and creativity.

Scientists are finding that consistent movement helps unlock words, notes, and brushstrokes for authors, musicians, and painters. But why? One Austrian researcher, who spent years studying the link between creativity and movement, found that the more his study participants moved—in terms of step count—the greater their creative output. Other scientists have found similar effects.

One hypothesis for this effect is that our current culture of multitasking “overloads our mental workspace,” and that going outside and moving about frees up space to create. Another theory is that movement boosts mood, which allows you to create.

There’s not an optimal dose of movement that is guaranteed to boost creativity, but some researchers find that cognitive benefits appear to begin after about three sessions per week of 30 to 60 minutes of activity. According to one scientist, “You start to develop new neurons on that dosage.” Furthermore, he adds, “you think more clearly and have the mental space to support creative thinking.”

I find that I come up with my best ideas in the middle of the night. But maybe that’s because I’d been outside moving around during the day. I should keep track.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Dizziness

Recently, several people I know have been hit with bouts of dizziness. A year or so ago, I’d saved an article about dizziness that I’d seen in a medical journal. The article isn’t particularly helpful for my purposes, but it did let me know that dizziness is a common problem that affects an estimated 36.8 million people in the US every year, and accounts for nearly 2 million annual visits to the emergency room. 

Because the causes of dizziness can range from pathologic, such as stroke, to benign, such as positional vertigo, it presents a diagnostic challenge to ER clinicians.  

I can’t do justice to this complicated topic, but here are some causes of dizziness:

• Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo: Caused by the dislodging of crystals in your inner ear that help you sense gravity. You can correct it yourself by performing a series of head and body movements to move the crystals back in place. (I’ve had this vertigo. It fixed itself.)
• Vestibular migraine: Caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain pathways that manage balance and pain. It can be brought on by stress, poor sleep, hormonal shifts, weather changes, and certain foods like aged cheese or red wine.
• Meunier's disease: A chronic inner ear disorder that causes recurring episodes of severe dizziness, ringing in the ears, fluctuating hearing loss, and a feeling of pressure or fullness in the ear. The root cause is unknown.
• Vascular vertigo: Caused by reduced blood flow or vascular problems in the brain, often linked to strokes or vertebral artery problems.
• Vestibular neuritis: Caused by an infection that inflames the main nerve of the inner ear.
• Other: Panic attacks, low blood pressure, dehydration, medication side effects and probably more.

These possibilities are positively dizzying!   

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Polypharmacy dangers

Polypharmacy means taking several medicines regularly, usually four or more. A recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association noted, “Between 2015 and 2025, approximately 63 serious adverse events attributed to drug-drug interactions were reported to the US Food and Drug Administration among adults aged 65 years or older, 10% of which were fatal.” (Older people have slower drug metabolism and more chronic conditions, plus they see more specialists prescribing medications and use more OTC drugs and supplements.)

Here are the drug combinations rated the most dangerous:

• Blood thinners, such as Warfarin, taken with NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, such as Aspirin and Advil), can dramatically increase the risk of internal bleeding.
• Blood pressure medications, such as Lisinopril, taken with diuretics, such as hydrochlorothiazide, plus NSAIDs, is a “triple whammy” that can cause acute kidney injury.
• Opioids, such as tramadol, taken with Benzodiazepines, such as lorazepam, can slow breathing and cause respiratory depression, confusion, falls, and overdose.
•  Antidepressants, such as Zoloft, taken with supplements, such as St. John’s Wort, can trigger serotonin syndrome—a buildup of serotonin, the symptoms of which can be mild  (shivering and diarrhea) to severe (muscle rigidity, fever and seizures), to death.
• Statins, such as Lipitor, taken with certain antibiotics, such as erythromycin, can cause muscle breakdown and kidney damage.
• Diabetes medications, such as insulin, taken with beta-blockers, such as metoprolol, can hide symptoms of low blood sugar, making hypoglycemia harder to detect.
• Anticholinergics, such as Benadryl, taken with sedatives, such as sleep aids, can increase the risk of confusion, falls, memory problems, and delirium.
• Multiple OTC cold and flu products taken together can cause liver damage. Examples of risky combinations include NyQuil plus Tylenol; DayQuil plus cough syrup; anything containing acetaminophen.

The intended audience for this article is doctors. I would have hoped that they already knew about these interactions.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Tacit knowledge

 A new startup company is trying to discover the hidden factors that make some scientific experiments succeed and others fail.  For example, one lab succeeded in detecting the Covid virus, but another, using the same protocols, failed.  

To determine how this happens, the company’s researchers are closely monitoring scientists as they work. Cameras capture their every move, and the scientists narrate their work into microphones. Artificial intelligence adds to the narrative with explanations such as “The operator resuspends the pellet by pipetting it up and down ten times.”  The idea is to capture science as it happens in such a way that artificial intelligence models can be trained to recognize every object the scientists used and every action they performed.

When scientists carry out experiments, they keep careful records in their lab notebooks. Subsequent researchers use those records to repeat the experiment. Sometimes the repeated experiment doesn’t work. That’s because not every detail got written down.

Scientists make thousands of minor decisions over the course of a day, such as how they shake a test tube. Such decisions are based on “tacit knowledge": the practical know-how, skills, and intuition that are difficult to write down, explain, or teach to others. Some researchers consistently get experiments to work, but they don’t know why. According to their colleagues, they have magic hands.

In reviewing the lab scientists’ audio and video records, researchers are finding that the workers are performing the same experiment in many different ways. As one analyst noted, “The variation we see even among well-trained scientists is pretty jaw-dropping.”

The researchers are going to have to sift through all this information in hopes of finding the secrets of success. Who knows? Maybe AI can figure it out.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.