brown2020

Phineas Gage

Growing up, I learned about Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman who survived an incredible accident in 1848 that shot a large iron rod through his brain, destroying the frontal lobes. Although Gage survived for another decade, his personality changed profoundly. The brain science books I read in the late 1980’s still used the over century-old example to introduce the idea that every function had a special location in the brain, and everything was hard-wired for life once you finished childhood. It turns out the hard-wired model of the brain was dead wrong, and academic opinion and dogma had led research down the wrong path for over 100 years.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, founder of Posit Science and one of the world’s leading brain scientists helped disprove the old “what you have is what you get” brain theories. In the 1980’s, Merzenich’s team developed the cochlear implant, a device that stimulates nerves in the inner ear with electrical signals that correspond to sound. With the “bionic ear”, people with profound deafness have learned to process the electrical signals and hear again. Merzenich went on to show that the brain can adapt and change based on all sorts of sensory input. How neurons wire together not only changes based on our experience with the world, but also based on our own thoughts. Posit Science applies this new knowledge of brain plasticity to brain training and brain fitness products that improve memory and processing speed to treat age-related cognitive decline.

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In Defense of Food

In his book, “In Defense of Food,” Michael Pollan traces the deterioration of the American diet to 1977, when dietary recommendations became political. A well intentioned Senator George McGovern had introduced the “Dietary Recommendations for the United States,” lamenting that the American diet had become full of fatty meats and sugary soft drinks that were causing disease. The report started a firestorm because every food has a powerful lobby. Discussion of actual foods had to be watered down only to mention mere nutrients. It was politically incorrect, for example, to distinguish between beef, chicken or fish. “Now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless – and politically unconnected – substance that may or may not lurk in them called saturated fat.”

Keeping the topic of nutrition close to and safe for the food lobbies, the 1977 Farm Bill placed our national nutritional authority with the US Department of Agriculture rather than an agency focused on human health. Our government and the massive agricultural subsidies that it doles out could now stop thinking about nutrition in terms of whole foods, which were too politically dangerous, and could shift to a reductionism that parsed food into a limited set of nutrients that could quantified, processed, and manufactured.

With food merely a vehicle for delivering nutrients, the age of manufactured and processed nutrients—Pollan does not call it food—could flourish. And the American obesity epidemic could begin.

Like every good manufacturing process that wins through ever increasing efficiency, our food supply raced toward the cheapest form of calories: Grains that could be mass produced and fertilized out of otherwise increasingly barren soil, to become concentrated and cheap forms of calories like high fructose corn syrup. We also shifted to feeding livestock with the same cheap calories. No more green leaves ever needed to enter our food chain. We always could add back in manufactured vitamins to fortify the products to meet the government recommendations.

But food is much more complex than the limited collection of nutrients that we currently understand. Each blueberry contains dozens and dozens of anti-oxidants balanced by hundreds of generations of natural selection. That’s just not the same as blueberry flavored high fructose corn syrup fortified with the singular chemical entity known as Vitamin C.

The reductionist approach to food as a collection of manufactured nutrients broke the longstanding connection between our food and nature. For eons, the act of preparing and eating food has been the primary and fundamental interface between our physical bodies and the nature that sustains us and of which we are part.

Where did it come from?

When the food chain was short, the foods themselves were complex, and we were reminded with every trip to the market of our connection to the natural world and to the soil from which our food originates. Food was something that we could identify: an apple, a banana, a chicken leg.

Now the manufactured food chain is long, with so many participants from so many places that we have no idea where the ingredients in the box of cereal we had for breakfast really came from. We no longer know what we are eating. It comes from a complex supply chain from around the world, a supply chain optimized by market forces for long shelf life and high margins, not for human health.

Michael Pollan’s advice is to leave behind manufactured processed nutrients and take a step back toward nature: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Sounds like good advice to me.

In the book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, Bill Tancer provides an inside view into just how much data about our online behavior is routinely collected and what those clicks reveal about the thoughts and intentions of a population. As head of Global Research for Hitwise, a web analytics company now part of credit ratings giant Experian, Bill Tancer has at his fingertips a continuous datastream from 25 million Internet users, collected anonymously through Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It must be even more fascinating to see Google’s data, as the most common act we do when we are interested in something is to type it into a search engine.

After reading Bill Tancer’s book, I put some of the ideas to the test with my own research based on web analytics made publicly available for free from Google and from Compete.com. If Internet behavior is an indicator of the intentions of a population, then what can we learn about the current political campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain? For a sense of perspective, I also included Hillary Clinton in my comparison. The Compete.com graph shows unique monthly visitors to BarackObama.com, JohnMcCain.com and HillaryClinton.com. Despite steady growth in visits to JohnMcCain.com in recent months, BarackObama.com led JohnMcCain.com in website visits for September by over 2.4 million monthly uniques visitors, with 5.5 million unique visitors to BarackObama.com compared to 3.1 million unique visitors to JohnMcCain.com.

BarackObama.com v. JohnMcCain.com v. HillaryClinton.com on Compete.com

On Google.com/Trends, Google reveals trends in the data it collects and records on what people have been typing into the search engine. I compared searches for Barack Obama, John McCain and again Hillary Clinton for all searches originating in the United States over the past 12 months. While searches for John McCain briefly overtook Barack Obama around the time of the Republican Convention, Barack Obama has had a steady lead.

Barack Obama v. John McCain v. Hillary Clinton in Google Trends

Zooming in to searches conducted in the past 30 days, we can see that interest in both candidates continues to increase as we get closer to election day on November 4. Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain in search traffic has accelerated, and by the end of October, Google searches for Barack Obama led John McCain by about 2.5 to 1.

30 Day Google Trends: Searches for Barack Obama v. John McCain v. Hillary Clinton

Google also gives us the top locations for search traffic, so we can easily see the top geographic hot spots for presidential candidate search terms, which should correlate to what people are thinking and talking about.

Top Regions for Presidential Searches on Google

Not surprisingly, there is a high overlap between the areas with the most searches for presidential candidates and the battleground states where the campaigns are the most intense. All of the key battlegrounds except Florida are in the top 10 regions in terms of presidential candidate search traffic, with the hottest races in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri at the top of the list.

Battleground States Map from New York Times

One of the insights Bill Tancer demonstrates in the book Click is how traditional television media can drive search traffic. A television advertisement can raise awareness of an issue, and then lead us or even explicitly give us a “call to action” to go to the Internet to dig deeper.

It is easy to jump to conclusions, because with the free web analytics used here, we don’t know what motivates the search behavior. It might easily be buzz about a parody of a candidate on Saturday Night Live, Steven Colbert, or the Daily Show with John Stewart, with a flurry of web searches to catch the clip on YouTube or Hulu.com. Some things we know for sure. First, the objective behavioral data of the Internet has proven many previously untested assumptions to be wrong. Second, despite the fact that campaigns produce more 30 second television sound bites than ever, our ability to dig deeper and learn more for ourselves means that it is a completely new world this time around.

The book Eating Fossil Fuels looks at agriculture and our food supply through the lens of energy and energy balance. When you add up the energy inputs of fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, irrigation, and tilling, the food produced on a typical acre of land today takes many more calories of energy to produce than the maximum energy that could possibly be generated from the sun through photosynthesis. Where does the extra energy come from? Mostly from fossil fuels. What does this mean? The current food system is unsustainable and in many more ways than most people realize. If you look at the energy content of the food we eat, we are literally eating fossil fuels.