exercise doesn't actually help depression

and now we know. All that advice about getting out and getting some exercise so you feel better is now not based on any real research. It seems that people do improve, but those people who get better

In the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry:

Results Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations were small and were best explained by common genetic factors with opposite effects on exercise behavior and symptoms of anxiety and depression. In genetically identical twin pairs, the twin who exercised more did not display fewer anxious and depressive symptoms than the co-twin who exercised less. Longitudinal analyses showed that increases in exercise participation did not predict decreases in anxious and depressive symptoms.

Conclusion Regular exercise is associated with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms in the population at large, but the association is not because of causal effects of exercise.

Here's the press release. I'm sitting on the couch from now on.

why i'm not a "psychologist" #17

besides the issues with telling people you are a psychologist at parties, there is stuff published on theories like this:

http://improbable.com/2008/08/06/terror-management-theory-and-female-bombshells/

(more comment to come)

one possible thing before breakfast

Thought Experiment I

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Charles Dodgson, Alice in Wonderland

I've already had breakfast, and this idea is a very possible thing, but thought experiments are very much in spirit of the beautiful Alice in Wonderland.

It's simple. Two points will help illuminate it. First, because special relativity abolished any idea of an absolute frame of reference in the universe, we have more than just imagined freedom to create our own maps of space - this freedom is, in a way, supported by physics*. Anything can be the stationary point in a defined frame of reference - the earth, which many people pick by default, or the sun, the Milky Way, Paris, Mecca, etc.

Second, consider that the information that reaches you at any point in time is limited by the light cone stretching around you in space and time, sortof like an unimaginably huge sphere, spreading outwards at the speed of light. As far as we know, nothing exists beyond your light cone, because by definition our observations are limited to this part of the universe. You are inescapably in the center.

With these two ideas, the freedom of frame of reference, and the centrality of your point of view granted simply by the speed of light revealing the observable universe, you can thus imagine that you are the stationary center of the universe. Put your brain in the center of everything, and try to imagine that it never moves, but everything else does. When you walk down the street, the Earth is spinning away under your feet, but your head remains still, in a location that hasn't changed, well, since you were an egg in the womb.

But you might wonder, if I'm walking down the street and I am not moving but my legs are moving the whole Earth, and slightly rotating the whole universe, wouldn't that be impossibly hard? It seems like it would be, however, it is the same problem, physically, to move your body with respect to the stationary frame of reference of the Earth as it is to move everything else with respect to the stationary frame of reference of your brain.

It's a bit of an odd way to look at things, but a rather illuminating perspective. An updated, and more fun, version of the the brain in a vat perspective. Your brain is the stationary center of the universe; things come into it, things happen inside it, things are done to the world. There is experienced light inside your head, but everywhere else is dark. The problem of planning is not how to move about the world, but how to move the world about you, how to bring new experiences and rewards to you. Think of those hand-held mechanical games where you are trying to navigate a little silver ball through a maze of obstacles into a hole by tilting the board - only think of the silver ball as completely stationary, with the maze world spinning by it until it falls home.

Sure, sure, this is sortof just amusing sophomoric philosophy, but simple changes in perspectives and reframing of problems like this can be extremely helpful in science.

One simple implication of this perspective is that everyone (and thing) can be seen as the center of the universe. Think what you will about ethical relativity; physical relativity is also lots of fun.

* this point taken from special relativity, of course, could change because of further developments in physics. I'm no expert on the preservation of relativity ideas in unified theories, but it seems like a good thing to preserve...

Listening to: John Luther Adams, In the White Silence