The voice in your head may help you recall and process words. But what if you don’t have one?
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Can you imagine hearing yourself speak? A voice inside your head – perhaps reciting a shopping list or a phone number? What would life be like if you couldn’t?
Some people, including me, cannot have imagined visual experiences. We cannot close our eyes and conjure an experience of seeing a loved one’s face, or imagine our lounge room layout – to consider if a new piece of furniture might fit in it. This is called “aphantasia”, from a Greek phrase where the “a” means without, and “phantasia” refers to an image. Colloquially, people like myself are often referred to as having a “blind mind”.
While most attention has been given to the inability to have imagined visual sensations, aphantasics can lack other imagined experiences. We might be unable to experience imagined tastes or smells. Some people cannot imagine hearing themselves speak.
A recent study has advanced our understanding of people who cannot imagine hearing their own internal monologue. Importantly, the authors have identified some tasks that such people are more likely to find challenging.
What the study found
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States recruited 93 volunteers. They included 46 adults who reported low levels of inner speech and 47 who reported high levels.
Both groups were given challenging tasks: judging if the names of objects they had seen would rhyme and recalling words. The group without an inner monologue performed worse. But differences disappeared when everyone could say words aloud.
Importantly, people who reported less inner speech were not worse at all tasks. They could recall similar numbers of words when the words had a different appearance to one another. This negates any suggestion that aphants (people with aphantasia) simply weren’t trying or were less capable.
A welcome validation
The study provides some welcome evidence for the lived experiences of some aphants, who are still often told their experiences are not different, but rather that they cannot describe their imagined experiences. Some people feel anxiety when they realise other people can have imagined experiences that they cannot. These feelings may be deepened when others assert they are merely confused or inarticulate.
In my own aphantasia research I have often quizzed crowds of people on their capacity to have imagined experiences.
Questions about the capacity to have imagined visual or audio sensations tend to be excitedly endorsed by a vast majority, but questions about imagined experiences of taste or smell seem to cause more confusion. Some people are adamant they can do this, including a colleague who says he can imagine what combinations of ingredients will taste like when cooked together. But other responses suggest subtypes of aphantasia may prove to be more common than we realise.
The authors of the recent study suggest the inability to imagine hearing yourself speak should be referred to as “anendophasia”, meaning without inner speech. Other authors had suggested anauralia (meaning without auditory imagery). Still other researchers have referred to all types of imagined sensation as being different types of “imagery”.
Having consistent names is important. It can help scientists “talk” to one another to compare findings. If different authors use different names, important evidence can be missed.
We have more than 5 senses
Debate continues about how many senses humans have, but some scientists reasonably argue for a number greater than 20.
In addition to the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, lesser known senses include thermoception (our sense of heat) and proprioception (awareness of the positions of our body parts). Thanks to proprioception, most of us can close our eyes and touch the tip of our index finger to our nose. Thanks to our vestibular sense, we typically have a good idea of which way is up and can maintain balance.
It may be tempting to give a new name to each inability to have a given type of imagined sensation. But this could lead to confusion. Another approach would be to adapt phrases that are already widely used. People who are unable to have imagined sensations commonly refer to ourselves as “aphants”. This could be adapted with a prefix, such as “audio aphant”. Time will tell which approach is adopted by most researchers.
Why we should keep investigating
Regardless of the names we use, the study of multiple types of inability to have an imagined sensation is important. These investigations could reveal the essential processes in human brains that bring about a conscious experience of an imagined sensation.
In time, this will not only lead to a better understanding of the diversity of humans, but may help uncover how human brains can create any conscious sensation. This question – how and where our conscious feelings are generated – remains one of the great mysteries of science.
Derek Arnold, Professor, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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We talk a lot about being ‘resilient’. But what does it actually mean?
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In a world with political polarisation, war, extreme weather events and increasing costs of living, we need to be able to cope as individuals and communities.
Our capacity to cope with very real stressors in our lives – our resilience – can determine whether we thrive, just survive, or are deprived of a reasonable quality of life.
Kinga Howard/Unsplash Stress vs resilience
Resilience means having the ability to cope with, and rebound from, life’s challenges and still achieve our goals.
Stress isn’t something to be avoided. We need to feel some stress to achieve our best. Exposure to manageable levels of stress and adversity develops our coping skills and resilience.
But if we feel too much stress, we can flounder or become overwhelmed.
The ability to re-activate ourselves when we feel down, fatigued or disengaged helps to optimise our focus and motivation. Sportspeople, for example, might listen to high intensity music just before a competition to increase their energy levels.
Conversely, the ability to dampen down emotional intensity can make use feel less stressed or anxious. Exercising, listening to relaxing music, or patting a much-loved pet can prevent high arousal from interfering with completing a task.
Effective emotion regulation is crucial for adapting to life’s ups and downs, and keeping us on a relatively even keel.
How does resilience develop?
Resilience emerges from interactions between personal and environmental factors.
In addition to emotion regulation skills, personal factors that can bolster resilience include academic achievement, developing a range of skills and abilities (such as sport and music) and problem-solving skills. Many of these skills can be fostered in childhood. And if one area of life isn’t going well, we can still experience confidence, joy and meaning in others.
Sometimes we need to increase our energy levels, other times we need to lower anxiety. Ilias Chebbi/Unsplash People who reflect on traumatic experience and develop new positive meanings about themselves (getting through it means I’m strong!) and life (a greater appreciation) can also have higher levels of resilience.
Genetic factors and temperament also play an important role. Some of us are born with nervous systems that respond with more anxiety than others in novel, uncertain, or potentially threatening situations. And some of us are more likely to avoid rather than approach these situations. These traits tend to be associated with lower levels of resilience. But we can all learn skills to build our resilience.
Environmental factors that promote resilience include:
- a nurturing home environment
- supportive family and peer relationships
- cultural identity, belonging and rituals
- modelling from others overcoming hardship
- community cohesion
- government policies that provide social safety nets, strong education, anti-discrimination and inclusion
- investment in facilities, spaces, services and networks that support the quality of life and wellbeing of communities.
Can resilience be taught?
Many factors associated with resilience are modifiable, so it stands to reason that interventions that aim to bolster them should be helpful.
There is evidence that interventions that promote optimism, flexibility, active coping and social support-seeking can have small yet meaningful positive effects on resilience and emotional wellbeing in children and adults.
However, school-based programs give us reason to be cautious.
A trial across 84 schools in the United Kingdom evaluated the effectiveness of school-based mindfulness programs. More than 3,500 students aged between 11 and 13 years received ten lessons of mindfulness and a similar number did not.
There was no evidence that mindfulness had any benefit on risk for depression, social, emotional and behavioural functioning, or wellbeing after one year. Teaching school children mindfulness at scale did not appear to bolster resilience.
In fact, there was some evidence it did harm – and it was most harmful for students at the highest risk of depression. The intervention was not deemed to be effective or cost-effective and was not recommended by the authors.
In another recent trial, researchers found an emotion regulation intervention with Year 8 and 9 school children was unhelpful and even harmful, although children who engaged in more home practice tended to do better.
The evidence doesn’t support school-based resilience programs. Mitchell Luo/Unsplash These interventions may have failed for a number of reasons. The content may not have been delivered in a way that was sufficiently engaging, comprehensive, age-appropriate, frequent, individually tailored, or relevant to the school context. Teachers may also not be sufficiently trained in delivering these interventions for them to be effective. And students didn’t co-design the interventions.
Regardless of the reasons, these findings suggest we need to be cautious when delivering universal interventions to all children. It may be more helpful to wait until there are early signs of excessive stress and intervening in an individualised way.
What does this mean for resilience-building?
Parents and schools have a role in providing children with the sense of security that gives them confidence to explore their environments and make mistakes in age-appropriate ways, and providing support when needed.
Parents and teachers can encourage children to try to solve problems themselves before getting involved. Problem-solving attempts should be celebrated even more than success.
Schools need to allocate their scarce resources to children most in need of practical and emotional support in non-stigmatising ways, rather than universal approaches. Most children will develop resilience without intervention programs.
To promote resilience, schools can foster positive peer relationships, cultural identity and involvement in creative, sporting and academic pursuits. They can also highlight others’ recovery and resilience stories to demonstrate how growth can occur from adversity.
More broadly in the community, people can work on developing their own emotion regulation skills to bolster their confidence in their ability to manage adversity.
Think about how you can:
- approach challenges in constructive ways
- actively problem-solve rather than avoid challenges
- genuinely accept failure as part of being human
- establish healthy boundaries
- align your behaviour with your values
- receive social and professional support when needed.
This will help you navigate the ebbs and flows of life in ways that support recovery and growth.
Peter McEvoy, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Curtin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Gooseberries vs Limes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing gooseberries to limes, we picked the gooseberries.
Why?
It wasn’t close:
In terms of macros, gooseberries have nearly 2x the fiber for the same carbs and protein, scoring an easy first-round win.
In the category of vitamins, gooseberries have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, and E, while limes have more vitamin B9. They’re equal in other vitamins they both contain, including vitamin C. So this one’s a win for gooseberries too.
Looking at minerals, gooseberries have more copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while limes have more calcium and iron, meaning another rather one-sided win for gooseberries.
In other considerations, gooseberries also have more polyphenols, so that’s another point in their favor.
Adding up the sections makes for an overwhelming overall win for gooseberries, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Enjoy!
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Papaya vs Strawberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing papaya to strawberries, we picked the papaya.
Why?
It was close!
In terms of macros, they are too close to call it, so it’s a tie in this category.
In the category of vitamins, papaya has more of vitamins A, B2, B5, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while strawberries have (slightly) more vitamin B6, making an easy win for papaya in this round.
Looking at minerals, papaya has more calcium, magnesium, potassium, and selenium, while strawberries have more iron, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc, for a 4:4 tie.
In other considerations, they both have generous but largely different polyphenols, for a tie in this category.
Adding up the sections makes for a win for papaya on the strength of the vitamins, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Which B Vitamins? It Makes A Difference
Enjoy!
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The Body Fat That Can Help Against Diabetes?
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When it comes to type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes, one of the first things doctors will typically advise most people is to lose weight.
There is logic to this—it is known that body fat can reduce insulin sensitivity (spoiler: there’s nuance to this, though—more on this later!).
However, in many cases of advising people to lose weight, the first and foremost reason is a more a matter of Fat’s Real Barriers To Health.
So what’s this fat that can help?
We’ll get to that shortly.
First, let’s talk about the fat that really doesn’t help: visceral fat
We wrote more about visceral fat, here: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← “visceral belly fat” is actually a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily (since the only place we get it is the viscera of the abdominal cavity), but including both terms makes the article easier to find when using our website’s search function 😉
Metabolically, it’s very different from subcutaneous fat. Now, we do need some! Those organs do need cushioning, after all. But it’s all-too-easy to have too much of a good thing, in which case, it becomes a very bad thing.
Researchers (Dr. Elsa Vasquez Arreola et al.) found that prediabetes can go into remission without weight loss, with about one in four people normalizing blood sugar despite no drop in body weight.
And, notably, remission without weight loss provides the same level of protection against future type 2 diabetes as remission achieved through losing weight.
This is a huge help, because focusing only on weight loss hasn’t worked well for many people, who become discouraged by being hounded to lose weight and then not being able to do so, and if they think their health is really going to be dependent on weight loss, they well just give up.
As it turns out, blood sugar improvements depend more on fat distribution than total body weight.
And why?
Let’s go back to those two types of fat we mentioned earlier:
- Visceral fat: fat stored around your internal organs increases inflammation and disrupts insulin function, raising blood sugar levels.
- Subcutaneous fat: fat stored under your skin (i.e. the fat you can reach to squish) can actively support healthy metabolism by releasing hormones that improve insulin sensitivity.
Now, with that in mind, guess what happened in the study? That’s right, people who reversed prediabetes without weight loss shifted fat away from abdominal organs towards subcutaneous stores, which explains why remission was associated with better insulin sensitivity and improved pancreatic beta-cell function.
You can read the paper in full, here: Prevention of type 2 diabetes through prediabetes remission without weight loss
What to do about it
Firstly, do see our previously-mentioned article: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It for the dos and don’ts of getting healthier (which for most people means: lower) visceral fat levels.
Next up, see also: Body Fat & Pelvic Floor Problems: What Matters Most Is Where The Fat Is for the science behind “apple or pear” distributions, and how to switch it up.
You may also be wondering: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? And the answer is yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts. The article we just linked there shows how.
While we’re at it, one other place you really don’t want excess fat, for metabolic reasons, is your liver. So: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
Want to learn more?
You might like this book that we reviewed a while ago:
Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).
Enjoy!
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The Doctor’s Kitchen: Healthy High Protein – by Dr. Rupy Aujla
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We previously reviewed another recipe book by the same author, the original “The Doctor’s Kitchen”, and this time it’s more of the same but with a focus on, as the title says, high protein—delivered healthily.
Before the recipes, we get an overview of the science of protein metabolism, how much we need, and how we can get it from various foods. Because of the emphasis on health, meat isn’t high on the list—but the recipes aren’t all vegan, or even all vegetarian, although there is certainly a “plants-forward” focus throughout.
Dr. Aujla not being vegan himself is probably a limiting factor on the diversity of the vegan dishes, as he says “if you don’t like soy products or are allergic, you will certainly struggle to get enough protein”. Which is very simply not remotely true (this vegan reviewer gets most of her protein from beans, lentils, and nuts), but he seems to believe it, and for this reason we see a lot of tofu, tempeh, and so forth in the recipes.
His lack of diversity of experience with vegan cooking notwithstanding, the recipes he does present are very good, so it’s not a problem so much as a limitation, that’s all.
When he says “healthy high protein”, he not only means that the protein sources will be healthy, but also the rest of the meal too. And, a lot of people think of “healthy” as being “not unhealthy”, but Dr. Aujla cares a lot about positive health—adding in ingredients with many vital nutrients, ensuring that each dish is gut-healthy, anti-inflammatory, and so forth. All these things add up to “healthy”. In short, “healthy” is not merely the absence of unhealthy ingredients, but rather is a matter of vibrant inclusion of things that will actively uplift our health and fortify us against disease.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook with plants more, want to get plenty of protein, and do not dislike soy or have an allergy, then this book will be a fine addition to your kitchen.
Click here to check out The Doctor’s Kitchen: Healthy High Protein, and expand your repertoire!
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Train For The Event Of Your Life!
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Mobility As A Sporting Pursuit
As we get older, it becomes increasingly important to treat life like a sporting event. By this we mean:
As an “athlete of life”, there are always events coming up for which we need to train. Many of these events will be surprise tests!
Such events/tests might include:
- Not slipping in the shower and breaking a hip (or worse)
- Reaching an item from a high shelf without tearing a ligament
- Getting out of the car at an awkward angle without popping a vertebra
- Climbing stairs without passing out light-headed at the top
- Descending stairs without making it a sled-ride-without-a-sled
…and many more.
Train for these athletic events now
Not necessarily this very second; we appreciate you finishing reading first. But, now generally in your life, not after the first time you fail such a test; it can (and if we’re not attentive: will) indeed happen to us all.
With regard to falling, you might like to revisit our…
…which covers how to not fall, and to not injure yourself if you do.
You’ll also want to be able to keep control of your legs (without them buckling) all the way between standing and being on the ground.
Slav squats or sitting squats (same exercise, different names, amongst others) are great for building and maintaining this kind of strength and suppleness:
(Click here for a refresher if you haven’t recently seen Zuzka’s excellent video explaining how to do this, especially if it’s initially difficult for you, “The Most Anti-Aging Exercise”)
this exercise is, by the way, great for pretty much everything below the waist!
You will also want to do resistance exercises to keep your body robust:
Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
And as for those shoulders? If it is convenient for you to go swimming, then backstroke is awesome for increasing and maintaining shoulder mobility (and strength).
If swimming isn’t a viable option for you, then doing the same motion with your arms, while standing, will build the same flexibility. If you do it while holding a small weight (even just 1kg is fine, but feel free to increase if you so wish and safely can) in each hand will build the necessary strength as you go too.
As for why even just 1kg is fine: read on
About that “and strength”, by the way…
Stretching is not everything. Stretching is great, but mobility without strength (in that joint!) is just asking for dislocation.
You don’t have to be built like the Terminator, but you do need to have the structural integrity to move your body and then a little bit more weight than that (or else any extra physical work could be enough to tip you to breaking point) without incurring damage from the strain. So, it needs to not be a strain! See again, the aforementioned resistance exercises.
That said, even very gentle exercise helps too; see for example the impact of walking on osteoporosis:
Living near green spaces linked to higher bone density and lower osteoporosis risk
and…
So you don’t have to run marathons—although you can if you want:
Marathons in Mid- and Later-Life
…to keep your hips and more in good order.
Want to test yourself now?
Check out:
Building & Maintaining Mobility
Take care!
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