ASM035 ADD, Hell, and Why Babies Are Cute

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add hell and why babies are cute all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this weekend i'm going to be part of the making peace weekend at good samaritan church in tallahassee that's my home church and we're putting on a completely free conference we'd love to see you there all you have to do is register for free and you can come other than that let's get it started hey science mike what is the science behind adhd or add i've often heard and read that it is over diagnosed and that it's not even a real disorder but just the result of kids especially americans spending too much time in front of screens i was diagnosed with mild adhd when i was 18 and can tell that i have a harder time with some things than most others i know i also spent very little time in front of the tv and computer as a kid so what is adhd exactly is it a legitimate disorder that she medicated thanks for making us smarter happier people you know screens really have a bad reputation these days our televisions and ipads and iphones and tablets and smartphones and smart watches and glowing rectangles everywhere are blamed for all kinds of ills and the data i've seen leads me to believe there's not anything particularly troubling about moderate amounts of screen time and screen time itself is probably not that bad for you it's actually what a lot of screen time prevents you from doing that's not healthy you tend to be sedentary when you're watching television using the computer or on the phone and for children especially they learn most and develop the fastest when they interact with other children in real play settings when they're outdoors when they're playing with real tactile objects it enriches the brain's function by incorporating more parts of the brain simultaneously in honing better neurological skills and development so there's no real correlation i've seen between too much television and adhd and here's why add and adhd are legitimate neurological conditions it's a real thing in fact some researchers believe that they found the gene that controls adhd and we can see this in the brain for people that don't have adhd when they're in an unfocused state there's a synchronicity there's a coordination between the brain's default mode networks so the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex kind of work together and stay in sync even when you're not focused on something in children and adults that have adhd that's not the case their default mode network is desynchronized so that's a legitimate measurable neurological phenomenon that's not a myth adhd as far as we can tell in science appears to be real now 10 to 15 percent of the children in the united states are diagnosed with adhd and scientists who specialize in the genetic and neurological markers of adhd believe that it's probably closer to three to eight percent maybe five percent of children actually have neurological adhd so this is both a real disorder and a disorder that is probably over diagnosed by a factor of two or even three and this diagnosis this excessive diagnosis is driven frankly by drug companies the term adderall which was the original blockbuster add drug literally comes from the words for all it came out of a marketing meeting to try to figure out how to expand sales of a stimulant a stimulant that wasn't originally designed for the disorder but appeared to be therapeutic ended up creating an industry of uh drugs that treated this disorder and based on economic incentives once you have a drug you have a profit motive and you have people whose job it is to make sure the drug gets sold drug companies of course sponsor seminars and sponsor retreats where they educate doctors about their drugs that's a necessary function doctors have to learn about drugs to prescribe them but that incentive structure of needing to sell the drugs and providing the information causes problems now contrary to many people i don't actually think drug companies are evil or intentionally trying to destroy lives there's a book called the honest truth about dishonesty that i really enjoy that digs deep into research about why people do dishonest things and the fact is most people believe themselves to be good but when given the correct incentive structure good people will cheat in small ways over time and it turns out that many of the things that are problems in our society are the results of good people cheating in small ways over and over and i think add medication over prescription driven by marketing is one of those things there's no nefarious conspiracy there's simply a profit motive that subtly works on human cognition so fix the incentive issue between drug companies and doctors and you'll fix the problem with over diagnosis which is important because what we don't want is in reaction to an over diagnosis and over prescription of medication is for people who legitimately have adhd to have their experience minimized or to be unable to be treated for the condition it is a real condition it's medically and scientifically validated and it's probably over subscribed [Music] our next question comes from twitter and it's from hannah she asks i hear the phrase sugar feeds cancer quite frequently where does that come from and is there data well here's the thing i've heard that belief before that sugar feeds cancer and it's not true scientifically speaking there's not really any data to support that now of course every cell in a human body depends on blood sugar in the form of glucose to get energy and to function but there is no data to support that there's a correlation between the amount of sugar in the bloodstream and the development of new cancer cells or the growth rate of existing cancer cells now this is based on something i read with the mayo clinic uh this misconception could be based on a misunderstanding of how pet scans work basically when you use a little radioactive tracer that is a form of glucose that's used to transport this radioactive molecule and absorb it into tissue tissues that are using more energy like cancer cells absorb this tracer more frequently and therefore show up more clearly on pet scans but that would be true of any systems in your body that use a lot of energy for example the cells in your intestine your colon that grow very rapidly because they have short life spans those would also show up more brightly in pet scans because of that increased absorption rate that doesn't mean that sugar feeds colon cells any more than sugar feeds cancer cells now on the other hand you can make a reasonable case in data that consuming a lot of sugar can increase your risk for types of cancer like esophageal cancer and it also a high sugar diet is associated of course with diabetes and with obesity and even morbid obesity and both of those are risk factors for cancer so while sugar doesn't directly feed cancer and the amount of sugar you eat even on chemotherapy is something your doctor should dictate not you know something something you eat on the internet but lots and lots of sugar leading to unhealthy lifestyles can contribute to the risk of cancer i've also read myths like this about alkalinity and ph related to cancer and how it's important to have an alkaline diet to counteract the effects of acid in your bloodstream and of course the body tightly regulates the ph of your blood and so the acidity or non-acidity of your foods isn't going to affect your blood ph level uh in general i am very skeptical of these kinds of food health claims on the internet and i always want to see them in some trusted journal with peer-reviewed data before i take them seriously because people take little kernels of worthwhile information and then distort that into something that is at best benign and often harmful we don't want to see people with cancer trying to self-medicate by reducing their sugar intake or drinking a lot of alkaline products it won't help them i understand the impulse of course i understand you know looking for new information out there i love that i'm an inquisitive person but our our curiosity and our inquisitive nature has to be married to some degree of skepticism or else we'll accept claims that just don't have a lot of merit potentially with disastrous effects on our health be careful it's a jungle out there on the internet oliver from twitter asks my flatmate tells me babies are born with big eyes so they are cute to us i can't believe it can you help yes i think i can babies do have larger eyes in relation to their other features than we do and we think that's cute and that is likely a function of natural selection and not just natural selection on its own but natural selection working as a feedback loop between two developing systems namely adults who become parents and infants so you can imagine that any adult human who favored the markers of infants with their large eyes and their big heads compared to their body and their relative hairlessness and those sorts of features may take better care of their babies in fact this was probably a feature that predates humanity this is a very mammalian feature of the way that mammals tend to be nurturing and humans and other animals when they see these markers in other species can be triggered to a nurturing or maternal reflex and so you can imagine that mammal babies who express these features more strongly are perceived as cuter and got more attention and then parents who picked up on those features were more likely to pay attention and this cycle of reward via natural selection occurs and emphasizes features over time the same thing happens with mates by the way in in men and women and humans and in male and female animals in the animal kingdom we are shaped by the preferences of the opposite sex in the animal kingdom i understand that might be heteronormative language for my lgbtq friends but i'm speaking biologically here without getting into some of the wild and willy features of sex in the animal kingdom so this this cycle repeats and it's how you get men who are broadchested and v-shaped and women who are more narrow-wasted and broader hipped and you have all these signals of fertility that we pick up on that are instinctual and in humans are then processed cognitively but we can get to a point where our cognition is deceived by our instinct or heavily influenced by it for example we love cartoons we think cartoons are cute because artists take these instinctive features and amplify them see if cartoons with absolutely unfeasibly massive eyes and and abnormally large heads compared to the bodies and we just think oh they're adorable we love to watch cartoons the same thing happens with dolls and toys we amplify these features and it is alluring to the human visual system and that's called supernormal stimuli that's the thing that has been studied and documented it's one of my favorite areas of research because you can see how animals evolved to have instinctive functions where they find things attractive or compelling and it's especially powerful regarding young so you can take a bird's egg and then emulate it but you make a fake egg that's maybe larger and bluer than the natural egg and what you'll find is mother songbirds will suddenly ignore their natural eggs their own eggs to try to warm this fake egg or you can create a fake baby chick that has a larger brighter mouth than the natural actual baby birds and the mom will try to feed the fake baby in fact you can create basically a red-bellied decoy for some species of fish and it doesn't really even matter the shape it's just the red or the belly that sign of dominance will encourage these male fish to try to fight this decoy and ignore rival males in the area really fascinating stuff humans are not immune to supernormal stimulus and that comes into play in how we eat and the things we entertain ourselves but also what we find adorable it's an interplay between instinct and cognition and we fall for it every time [Music] hey science mike so this is a theological question rather than a science one i grew up in a church that has a very specific view of hell but after pretty extensive researching reading scripture and praying i've come to believe there is no literal hell i believe in conditional mortality basically that our souls are going to die but faith in jesus grants eternal life in heaven i guess what i'm wondering is what are your thoughts on hell and knowing that your church is so diverse what kind of conversations do people in your church have about hell i guess that's it this is one of the first questions i got on ask science mike one of the very first not this particular recorded question it was actually an email question and this question has been sent in every single week since the show started and this month it was sent in more than any other question by far even more than any other category of question people seem interested in my thoughts on hell and man have i avoided it i have tried to stay as far away from this question as i possibly can the thing is like open and safe conversations are healthy i believe that they're the best way to live in the best way even to express our faith and i try to model that on this program i frequently take questions that make me uncomfortable that i know are making some people in the audience uncomfortable but i try to always say the honest thing even when that might not be the best pr move and believe me as this podcast keeps growing and the download numbers get higher and higher i worry about who those new listeners may be and what their background may be i started ask science mike for people who were spiritually homeless and frustrated people who felt like they had no place to have conversations in the church and either there's a lot more people like that than i ever estimated or other people are coming along for the ride at this point on the show because the download numbers are just crazy like i keep checking the the software on on our various servers to make sure that they're not wrong because i can't believe the numbers so i try to model grace i try to make it clear that whatever i hold on a given position i hold with grace and i understand that there are other opinions and other perspectives and i say often that i know that i'm wrong about some things i just don't know which things and this is important because discussing some ideas can trigger people because they are associated with identity some ideas are more than an issue to us they are part of how we view our identity and humans are naturally very defensive of their own identity marriage equality is an issue like that you know for people like me who are affirming of sex marriage and affirm marriage equality we we sometimes don't understand how people who are against it can take so seriously an issue that doesn't affect them but that's an issue that's not about the issue that's an issue of what of identity on both sides so you have one person so whose identity includes being lesbian or gay or transsexual or queer and a person on the other side for whom the sanctity of marriage is a theological proposition very closely tied to how they view the bible which is therefore tied to their identity and guess what the afterlife is like that only more so the afterlife is a bigger deal to people generally than marriage equality and i say that because an overwhelming majority of humanity believes in the afterlife and this includes people in secular nations this even includes people that self-identify as agnostic or atheist a majority of them believe in the afterlife in some way so in my tradition of speaking honestly and in grace i'm going to tell you the truth as i've said before on the program i have absolutely no idea what happens when we die i know that science is confident or places the most confidence in the idea that death is the end of consciousness that consciousness emerges from human brains and then when human brains stop functioning consciousness goes away it happens every night when we sleep many people find that idea terrifying i don't a cessation of consciousness would probably be the most perfect piece you could imagine but more than that when i think about hell specifically i think it's logically inconsistent with a god who is both all-powerful and loving if we accept the idea that there is an all-powerful loving god hell is difficult for me to swallow heaven not so much i can hold open the idea and hold out a hope in faith that when i die i am somehow reunited with god and that i'm very comfortable calling that heaven whatever that experience may be like but for an all-loving all-powerful god who is all-knowing to not simply send people to hell because many people who believe in hell don't believe god sends people to hell but to even allow souls to be sent to hell is tough for me to stomach and that's because of the time i spent as an atheist you see atheists ponder ethics from a different perspective and they they present some challenging questions about hell for example what crime is worthy of eternal conscious torment now we might say that genocide or murder or some other things are but the underpinning ideas of total depravity that absolutely any transgression from perfection is worthy of eternal conscious torment is a pretty tough sell for me it's also confusing to think that god could allow anyone to go to hell because we could say who chose to be created and who was aware of the stakes from the time they were an infant that would be like me as a father having an open coal fire in my backyard and having a deck with no railing and telling my children not to step over the edge but doing nothing to prevent them if a human did that we would call it criminal negligence now i know some hackles are raised right now i'm just telling you my honest take on a topic that people get really worked up about so there's these logical problems for me with hell but even if we kind of go to the biblical origin of hell i don't see a very convincing case you see academics believe that hell was not a part of judaism when the old testament was written and that as the new testament was written and canonized christians assimilated ideas of hell from greco-roman culture now certainly the gospels report jesus speaking of gajana many people understand or scholars believe was an actual trash dump where there was a fire all the time where there were worms and where people sorted through the trash and there was weeping and gnashing of teeth and that jesus was describing being away from god or or not participating in the kingdom of heaven as spending your time in gehana and who would want to go there so when i look at academics discussing hell it doesn't seem to have this eternal quality that we believers tend to assign to it it does not seem to be a timeless idea it seems to be a relatively recent bolted on addition to our faith of course all this rests on the fact that i'm an empiricist i place confidence in beliefs proportional to the evidence i have to support that belief that's how i view the world and i read the bible that way you see when i read the bible i see a human library of books about god god is absolutely the subject of the bible it is people writing about their experiences with god but make no mistake i believe humans authored the bible and i also understand this puts me way way out of mainstream christian beliefs and it's even heretical in some circles me talking about the bible and about yes hell has led to some christians calling me a false teacher or a false prophet i understand that i can't say i believe things that i don't believe that would be dishonest and even within christian doctrine hell is not a universal belief there are christians who are universalists who believe everyone goes to heaven there are christians who are annihilationists as you alluded to in your question who believe that people who don't go to heaven simply cease to exist consciously that does resolve some of the logical contradictions of the loving god that i see but let me be clear that i believe our human tendency toward sin does indeed disrupt the peace of god that is called shalom in the old testament that we by chasing these destructive impulses can create hell right here on earth when i look at situations that are happening now when i look at people fleeing their home countries because of war and conflict violence rape and pillage when i see children's bodies on a beach i can't say that i don't believe in hell because i think there are a lot of people alive right now who can tell you exactly what hell is like and they can tell you because they've been there [Music] well that's another week and another episode of ask science mike in the books thank you guys for listening thank you for participating in these conversations and thank you most of all for the graciousness you show me every time you send me an email or leave a review on itunes or say something on facebook page or twitter i just i can't get over how consistently kind and thoughtful you are i also love like i get that most of my audience disagrees with me on at least some significant issues in many cases most issues and you still show up because you believe in having these conversations with grace and openness and honestly guys it gives me hope for the church it gives me hope for the faith and for christianity as we wrap up 2015 there's a few events i've got going on i'd love to see you at i'll be a good samaritan like i mentioned at the top of the program for the peacemakers weekend this weekend you just go to [Music] goodsamaritantallahassee.org and click a link to register an rsvp the next weekend i'll be doing the sandbox cooperative that's an online event i'll have a link as we get closer to that on my website i'd love to interact with you online there'll be a live talk with an audience and some q a of course we're also going to do belong in london if you go the liturgist.com belong me michael gunger lisa gunger the honey badger all getting together with 130 people in london to talk about how we create safe spiritual communities in the context of a modern world where science faith and art cannot be divided where there is no boundary between sacred and secular any more really exciting also going to be at storyline in chicago this year so if you go to storylineconference.com don miller of course will be there corey robertson will be there miles adcox will be there bob goff a lot of good friends will be there we'll talk about how to live better story and i'd love to see you in chicago at storyline of course i am looking at bookings in 2016 we're going to do an ask science mic tour more details about that if you'd be potentially interested in hosting an ask science mike live just send me a contact form on my website and i'll get that to the right people and if you'd just like me to come speak at your you know college or church or conference i'd love to do that 2016 dates are booking now you can go to asksciencemike.com and in the upper right hand corner there's a square box that says bookmic click that and the folks at chaffee management can take care of you ask science mike is listener supported it's supported by your questions so you can send those in via ask sciencemike.com or the hashtag asksciencemike on social media it's supported by your itunes reviews and ratings thanks so much for that i see new ones every week and it is actually supported by generous people who choose to send me a dollar a month five dollars a month fifteen dollars a month whatever you've got everything helps you can give it any level and you can change or cancel a pledge at any time and there's all kind of perks for people who participate and as my speaking wines down and the next couple weeks we're really going to focus on those again of course if money is tight you can 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