Immune Conditioning: How to Get a Drug Response Without Taking the Drug

Sherbert instead of pills?  Count me in!

I learned about immune conditioning today and boy did it blow me away!  I was reading The Healing Mind that the body is physically able to have a drug response without actually getting the drug.  Immune conditioning research was motivated by patients taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, usually for when patients have an autoimmune disorders or when the patient is getting an organ transplant.  In both cases, the immune system starts attacking good tissues, so a major treatment is to mute the immune system to stop the attacks.

Researchers wanted to know if they could somehow use less of the immune-suppressing drug and still get a good result.  Turns out you can, you just need to do some Pavlov-type conditioning like Pavlov did with his drooling dogs.

All you need to do is pair taking the drug with some combination of stimulus like a taste, sound, or sight.  After consistent repetition, research shows that you can stop taking the drug and keep giving the taste, sound, or sight cue.  The body will still act as if it's getting the drug. 

This has even worked for humans when researchers paired a drug with white noise and sherbert.  Yummm. 

Caveat: the body's response without the drug is usually not as strong as with the original drug.  But even so, immune conditioning is used widely in the medical world to slow down how fast the body rejects a transplanted organ or to help decrease the drug dose needed by patients who need immune-suppressant drugs.

(This also explains the curious allergic response some people get to pictures of something they're allergic to.  The person's immune system is conditioned to have an allergic reaction when it sees the allergen, even when the allergen isn't even there.)

Welcome to My Bookshelf

Several hundred books line the walls of my living room.  Most are non-fiction and about 2/3 of them come from the UVa Library; the rest I own.  Of course, I can't be reading all of them at once.  (But most of them are reference books anyway, so they're not really meant to be read cover to cover.)

At any given time, I'm focusing on a handful of the books for reading and studying.

To easily show you which ones I'm reading, I added a page to my site called Bookshelf.  Check it out for pictures of my current reading list.  "Bookshelf" is one of the tabs near the top of this page.

10 Reasons Donating Blood is Good For You

"We're out of luck Marge...this one's already donated this summer, too."

Helping trauma victims and surgery patients make it through their ordeals is a good enough reason to donate.  But why not add reasons why it's good for you, the donor?  Here are 10 benefits of blood donation:

1. Cancer prevention  The more you donate blood (eligible every 56 days) the lower your risk for liver, lung, colon, throat and stomach cancers.  Wow, I had no idea...
2. Protect your heart  Florida Blood Services found that if you donate regularly, you are 88% less likely to get a heart attack and one third less likely to get a stroke.
3. "Helper's High"  People who volunteer get a release of endorphins which will make you feel happy for doing good.
4. Discipline & willpower  Ok, most people, even the regular donors, wouldn't say they love getting stabbed with a big ol' needle.  But getting yourself to go anyway even though you're helping someone you won't meet and you're getting health benefits that are hard to notice is great practice for developing discipline.  That's a virtue that will spill over into all parts of your life from relationships to work promotions.
5. Reduce iron levels  High blood iron levels are linked to heart disease and blood donation lowers blood iron levels.  This is especially critical for guys since they tend to have higher iron levels and higher levels of heart disease risk.  You'll also be replacing old blood with young, clean new blood, so donating is a great blood rejuvenator.  
6. Mini free checkup  Keep an eye on some of your basic health statistics.  Before you donate, the nurses will measure and tell you your blood pressure, pulse, iron levels, and sometimes even cholesterol.  This gives you earlier notice or any changes in these important numbers and a faster response might make all the difference.
7. Immune boost  Volunteers have higher levels of immunoglobin A, a critical part of your body's immune system.
8. Meet new people  It's always easiest to make new bonds with people when you're going through the same experience, so chatting with other donors in nearby chairs is a great way to keep your mind off the needle and to make new friends.   The types of people who came out of their way to donate are probably nicer than average anyway.
9. Free blood tests  Donors' blood is tested for many rarely-tested viruses and disorders like West Nile Virus and Hepatitis.  If the blood tests positive, they let the donor know, which helps them prevent further spread and get early treatment.
10. Have a productive day!  No matter what else happens that day, you're guaranteed to have a productive day since you donated blood someone will get to use and no one can take that away. 

Researchers Cure Picky Eating

While listening to a lecture called "On the Origins of a Cultural Species" (click to listen) from Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain & Culture, the speaker (Joe Henrich from the University of British Columbia) revealed the secret for fixing picky eating habits.

In the lecture, Joe Henrich talked about how kids choose to model their learning and behavior after slightly older, happy, confident-looking kids who are getting positive attention from parents and other important social figures.

If you have a picky eater, he offered some helpful advice based off of scientific research:

"If you want to convince a kid to change [picky eating habits], the best thing you can do is not give him incentives, not teach him about the health quality of the food, but to sit him down at a table with kids slightly older who really like the food.  They'll eat the food, he'll see them move it, and then next you'll find that that kid will request that food next time he comes.  He'll eat more of it, select it on his own."

This is a critical example of "show don't tell."  When you're fixing picky eating habits, don't insist that the kid eat such-and-such--that will only lead to resistance.  Instead, let them just observe and make their own choice.  Find slightly older kids as models who are (or can act) happy, very confident, and who love eating the food that the picky eater won't eat.

Have the picky eater sit at the table with the model kids and have the models eat the food enthusiastically and maybe even tell them in private ahead of time to exaggerate how much they love the food.  Kids are natural hams and having a silly role to play like this will be fun for them.

Don't tell the picky eater, "Notice how Ben and Amy love spinach!"  Just let the picky eater make their own observations and decisions.  Choices we make on our own give us the most long-lasting change.

About Time I Learned a New Language

The last time I learned a new language, I was 8 and living in Germany.  But if you're that young, you basically learn languages by osmosis since young brains are primed to learn new languages.  So can I really take credit for that?

Ok, so it's about time I learn a new language, I thought!  I need to learn one the painful, adult way.  Well, only half painful since I'm taking the easy way out by choosing French which is super closely related to Spanish, German and English.  Some of the words are even the same, letter for letter....just with unrecognizable pronunciations.

Hardest part about French-- that tough R sound wayyyyy in the back of your throat.  I need to be careful not to overdo it or my throat gets sore!  But it's really beautiful compared with the hard sounds of English and German, so I'm having a lot of fun learning.

Austen's Emma in Down-to-Earth English Class

I never took more than the bare requirements in English class in school.  I was always a science & math kind of girl and never even thought to give literature or language much thought.  But now it'd be useful for me to know the basic structure of a story, how to plan plots and develop characters that a reader will care about.

Again, iTunes U didn't let me down!  My favorite English class I've found was ENGL 202 for English majors at Harrisburg Area Community College.

In this course, we will read British literature from about 1790 to 1945, examining literary works from the Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth-century periods in an historical and cultural context, and delving into some of the significant issues and debates that characterize and inform the literature and art of these periods.

My last week of Lunchtime Lectures, I've listened to the prof's detailed commentary on Jane Austen's Emma.

Did you know that the popular Alicia Silverstone movie Clueless is a modern Beverly Hills remake of the Jane Austen version of the story?  I really enjoyed finding out how the characters and scenes in Emma were translated into the Clueless blockbuster version.  I was surprised how faithful of a translation Clueless was!

The professor goes through the book in about 5 minutes/chapter with plot summary and commentary.  Squeezes in sidebars about social class in early 19th century England or about wages or gender roles.

Best of all, the prof is down-to-Earth, completely practical and understandable and totally unpretentious.  Really clear & simple explanation, it's the English Literature class I never had.

For all the courses I'm listening to right now, click here.

Mortgaging My Morning Walk Talk

If I'm going to have a good day, it's got to start with a morning walk.  And with this brutally hot weather hitting near triple digits, my walks have to be in the morning so it's only 100% humidity and 80 degrees.  Bleh, my brain stops functioning above that temperature and I turn into a summer vegetable.  Luckily, once my morning walk is done for the day, I can tuck safely into my air conditioned apartment and stay functional.

Financial Theory

I usually listen to an audio lecture on my walks.  The last two Morning Walk Talks have been from a Yale University Financial Theory course by Professor John Geanakoplos, specifically about the mortgage market and the subprime mortgage crisis.  I learned...

1. the mortgage market was about as big as the stock market, in $
2. until it collapsed in Oct 2007, it wasn't given much attention by economists compared with the stock market
3. trying to make subprime (risky) loans into AAA (safe) bonds involved a lot of Titanic-esque reasoning ("Oh, the absolute worst case iceberg crash imaginable we might gash open two of the ship's compartments, but we can afford to rip open up to four compartments.  And it's totally unrealistic that would ever happen...")
4. the economy is super cyclic as we over and underestimate the value of goods and services
5. humans don't learn their lessons very well and each time we get to a new cycle, we relax, forget everything we've learned, and act like the next blowup is a big surprise.

Proud New Parent of a Dot Com Address

I registered my first ever domain name today!  It's 2011, I figure.  About time I have my own dot com.  But I think buying one always seemed like such a big deal...expensive or a hassle or just too hard to do for some goblin of a reason that refused to ever explicitly show itself.

After a decade of feet dragging, it turns out it only takes 15 minutes and costs less than $10/year.  Less than a fancy lunch sandwich/year.  Or cut out two Starbucks coffees?  Or one movie in theaters?  Or one shirt that's on sale?  You get the point--it's cheap!

Stay tuned for the details about my new site--what the content will be and when the site will launch!