From heart beats to health recipes: The role of fractal physiology in the Ancestral Health movement

The human body—an amazing biological system that scales up fractally from its cellular building blocks—exhibits an incredible ability to self heal. Why then, are chronic diseases and degeneration on the rise in the population? Why are we sicker, more obese, and more depressed and stressed than ever before in human history? Why can’t we heal? The answers to these questions may lie in our ancestry, and modern departure from the human ecological niche. The ability to heal requires proper spatio-temporal inputs—nutrition, sleep, stress, activity, and socialization—in order for cellular signaling to occur properly across semi-permeable cell membranes. We first review key steps in the evolutionary history of multicellular life, focusing on the fundamental role of cell-cell interactions. Next, we present this as an important framework by which to understand how the entrainment of physiological signals in homeostatic mechanisms reveals new insights into the processes of disease. Examples are drawn from the evolution of metabolism, nutrition, and respiration in multicellular life. We argue that disease processes result from a mismatch between the physiological inputs an individual receives and their optimal amount and fractal distribution as determined by an individual’s ancestry. A comparative analysis is a useful tool by which to illuminate deep homologies that reveal a mechanistic account for disease processes. This cell-molecular approach provides a useful contrast to the traditional reductionist approach to disease exemplified by the human genome project. As an example, we describe how cell-cell communication drives the ontogeny and phylogeny of physiology, producing the tissues, organs, and organ systems that hierarchically serve human physiology on various levels. Modern society, with its disconnected and stress-riddled lifestyle, is increasingly failing to provide the proper inputs for healthy gene expression and physiological function. Thus, the answers to our modern health woes—physical, mental, and social—may lie in acknowledging the powerful roles that our past has played in shaping our bodies. Finding ways to provide the proper inputs of the human ecological niche in the modern day may lead to significant, perhaps staggering improvements in our health and wellness. The fractal mathematics underpinning these dynamics also serves as a metaphor for the Ancestral Health Movement, which is currently arising as a multi-cultural, multi-national grass-roots pluralistic phenomenon

Selections on the Empirical and Theoretical Investigations of Behavioral Variability: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The study of behavioral variability continues to grow in importance and gather interest. A thorough understanding of the fundamental processes by which variation is generated and by which it is adaptive is potentially important to our understandings of a whole host of phenomena, including all types of learning, from basic skills to language and thought (Bateson & Martin, 2013) as well as the antifragility of complex systems (Taleb, 2012). This issue represents a brief look into an important scientific enterprise, extraordinarily vast in scope and implications (Brembs, 2010). Even if we accept a fundamental unpredictability to animal behavior, this does not preclude us from studying the nature of that unpredictability. Please enjoy the issue, and may it inspire your own creative variations

Rats distinguish between absence of events and lack of evidence in contingency learning.

The goal of three experiments was to study whether rats are aware of the difference between absence of events and lack of evidence. We used a Pavlovian extinction paradigm in which lights consistently signaling sucrose were suddenly paired with the absence of sucrose. The crucial manipulation involved the absent outcomes in the extinction phase. Whereas in the Cover conditions, access to the drinking receptacle was blocked by a metal plate, in the No Cover conditions, the drinking receptacle was accessible. The Test phase showed that in the Cover conditions, the measured expectancies of sucrose were clearly at a higher level than in the No Cover conditions. We compare two competing theories potentially explaining the findings. A cognitive theory interprets the observed effect as evidence that the rats were able to understand that the cover blocked informational access to the outcome information, and therefore the changed learning input did not necessarily signify a change of the underlying contingency in the world. An alternative associationist account, renewal theory, might instead explain the relative sparing of extinction in the Cover condition as a consequence of context change. We discuss the merits of both theories as accounts of our data and conclude that the cognitive explanation is in this case preferred

The Effects of Energy Drink Consumption on Cognitive and Physical Performance in Elite League of Legends Players.

To examine the cognitive and physical changes associated with consuming an energy drink concurrent to video gaming, we examined a convenience sample of nine elite League of Legends (LoL) e-sport players (21 ± 2 y, BMI 25.6 ± 3.4 kg/m2) consuming an energy drink (ReloadTM) or placebo (Placebo) in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled cross-over trial. Participants completed the same test battery prior to treatment consumption and after playing each of three competitive LoL games. Primary outcomes included measures of attention (Erikson Flanker Test), reaction time (Go/No-Go test) and working memory (n-back test). Secondary outcomes examined fatigue (hand grip strength and finger tap speed). Statistical analysis was performed by repeated-measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) and reported as the mean (standard deviation [SD]) or mean change (95% confidence interval [CI]). Participants reported sleeping 8.1 (1.2) h/night, playing LoL 10.3 (2.1) h/d, playing other video games 1.8 (2.8) h/d, and exercising 4.2 (1.7) times per week. Overall, we observed no significant time, group, or group-by-time interactions for any measured performance index with the exception of a significant improvement for the n-back test, where the Reload group demonstrated a significant within-group improvement: Reload [-171 ms (95% CI, -327.91, -14.09), p < 0.004], Placebo [-92 ms (95% CI, -213.63, 29.63)]. However, no between-group differences were noted (38.50 ms, 95% CI, -141.89, 64.89, p = 0.803). Our findings suggest that elite eSport athletes do not demonstrate a mental or physical improvement in performance relative to the treatment supplement or indices measured in this study

Attributional and Relational Processing in Pigeons

Six pigeons were trained using a matching-to-sample procedure where sample and rewarded comparisons matched on both attributional (color) and relational (horizontal or vertical orientation) dimensions. Probes then evaluated the pigeons’ preference to comparisons that varied in these dimensions. A strong preference was found for the attribute of color. The discrimination was not found to transfer to novel colors, however, suggesting that a general color rule had not been learned. Further, when color could not be used to guide responding, some influence of other attributional cues such as shape, but not relational cues, was found. We conclude that pigeons based their performance on attributional properties of but not on relational properties between elements in our matching-to-sample procedure. Future studies should look at examining other attributes to compare attributional versus relational processing