I’m baaack. After three months.
Not that I ever really went away. Well, I did for a little bit. I was in Chicago visiting family in March and then I spent two weeks on vacation last month in Mexico.
Ok, I’m going to get a mandatory photo out of the way first. Science can wait.
So pretty! And there are a thousand or so more photos where this one came from.
But before I forget, I want to thank the contact on LinkedIn who asked me to restart this newsletter. Probably not a good thing for the rest of you who have to spend that extra second deleting and unsubscribing. But it’s been a while. I feel like a lucky punk. I’ll take my chances.
How have you been? I mean specifically… apart from the general ennui. Have you suffered enough to quit Twitter yet? No? Has AI taken away your job yet? No?
I see. Things could be better or worse.
Where to start (or rather restart) from my end? How about a rather contentious topic of when children should wake up and go to school. If you are a parent then you are convinced that you know what’s best for your child. And indeed my parents and many others thought that the early morning was the best time to study. And schools have typically started very early. Is it the best thing to wake up your teenage child early in the morning?
I decided to wade in the controversy in my science column for Hindustan Times this week.
For much of history, children and teenagers were thought of as small versions of adults without much consideration of their unique metabolism and development. Scientific studies had not progressed to the point that individual and population differences were well known either or that we understood the biological links between the circadian system — our internal, daily cycle or “body clock” — and health.
We now know that every adult has their own “chronotype” which determines their preference for being a “morning person” or an “evening person”. People have varying optimal times for different activities too. But this chronotype isn’t a fixed inherited characteristic. Age is one of the factors that determine chronotype.
This is the critical point that’s missed when we force children and teenagers to conform to adult schedules. Groundbreaking research by Lynne Hasher’s team at the University of Toronto has shown that on average, adults (and especially those over the age of 50) do better in cognitive tests at 8 or 9 AM in the morning compared to 4 or 5 PM in the afternoon. Teenagers' performances, in contrast, are poorer in the morning but get better during the day.
In their book Circadian Rhythms, University of Oxford neuroscientist Russell Grant Foster and biologist Leon Kreitzman gets to the heart of the matter, writing that “senior teachers in their fifties will generally be at their best the first thing in the morning, but their students will invariably be ill-prepared by their circadian system to learn…The senior teachers and not the students determine the timetable and the tacit assumption for well over a century has been that students are most alert in the morning and the most important and intellectually demanding subjects should naturally be taught during this time. This assumption is wrong.”
To make the problem relatable to adults, Foster and Kreitzman tell us that teenagers suffer from a “social jetlag” of two hours and that asking a teenager to wake up at 7 AM in the morning is like asking a 50-year-to get up at 5 AM. Though there’s variation among people in a population, young adults benefit from staying in bed early in the morning, while adults in their fifties and sixties are early risers; their peak cognitive performance often occurs mid-morning.
Not only are teenagers without “social jetlag” happier, but studies indicate they are healthier too. Each hour of “social jetlag” is linked to a 30 percent greater risk of being overweight or obese.
I’ll leave this here. You can read the entire column here.
Pollution in paintings
I mentioned that I was in Chicago in March. I’ve been there many times before but this was the first time that I actually entered the Art Institute. Students of Indian history and religion may know this building as the one where Swami Vivekananda delivered his speech at the Parliament of Religion in 1893. There’s a plaque that commemorates the event.
The Art Institute currently houses one of the largest collections of art in the United States. On exhibit are some exquisite painting by Claude Monet, who is my favorite artist.
Take a look at this painting of the Houses of Parliament. Notice how blurry it is?
There’s a study that has correlated the blurriness of Monet’s paintings while he was in London to air pollution. I wrote about it in March.
From 1899 to 1901, Monet created close to 100 different views of the Thames River while he was in London. These paintings, which hang in some of the leading art museums of the world, show a thick haze obscuring buildings such as the Houses of Parliament.
Writing in a research article published in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Anna Lea Albright of Sorbonne University in Paris and Peter Huybers from Harvard University link the lack of visibility and “whiter colour palette” in Monet’s paintings (and that of another contemporary painter JMW Turner) to air pollution. They conclude that Monet’s “paintings capture elements of the atmospheric environmental transformation during the Industrial Revolution”.
It is a fascinating new study that correlates real air pollution to the clarity and vibrancy filtered through the sight and imagination of an artistic genius. But it isn’t the first attempt of this kind.
Paintings can be correlated to environmental patterns. In 2017, three researchers argued that the red sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, was prompted after he was “terrified after seeing a spectacular mother-of-pearl cloud event.”And based on lunar tables, text, and topographic data, the moment of creation of Vincent van Gogh’s Moonrise has been dated to 2108 hours, local time on 13 July 1889.
Coming back to Monet, we find that after he returned to France, his paintings bore the hallmarks of his earlier vibrant phase. But even this phase would come to an end. By 1912, when Monet was in his 60s, he started to suffer from cataracts in both eyes. Glasses and drops did not improve the situation and Monet’s paintings changed due to his failing eyesight.
Monet complained that “reds had begun to look more muddy.” His paintings from this phase have coarse brushstrokes and darker colours. He also labelled paint tubes to be able to ascertain their hues properly. Fortunately, the damage to his eyesight was not permanent.
There would be yet one more change to Monet’s vision — this time for the better. In 1923, after surgery to remove the lens of his right eye, his paintings showed the contrast and vibrancy of his earlier paintings again. And it is during this later phase of his life that he painted the murals that now adorn the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.
What should we make of these new studies that tie the environmental conditions in which an artist lived and their eye health with the characteristics of their artistic output? We have some evidence that there are factors that might have contributed to a widely known artist’s visual development. And to be clear, I think it is absolutely fascinating that we can correlate actual events and health conditions to the artistic style of a prolific genius like Monet.
A conversational, personal AI
Most of the discussion on generative AI has focused on increasing productivity or knowledge— and certainly my own interactions with ChatGPT, Bard AI, and Bing AI have been geared to generating specific answers or outputs. As impressive as these AI systems are, conversations often feel stilted and impersonal.
Flying under the radar so far is Pi, a conversational personal AI. So far, its chats seem more friendly than know-it-all.
Have you tried Pi online or on the iOS app? What do you think?
What else I’ve read:
In a small study, artificial intelligence and brain imaging have been used together to “inch closer to mind reading”. Here’s an excellent write-up in STAT.
“Bacteria can be engineered to fight cancer in mice. Human trials are coming.”
“Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health” finds a panel, reporting in Nature Mental Health. this study was published around the same time that the U.S. Surgeon General , Dr. Vivek Murthy warns that “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” So which is it?
That’s it for now. If you’ve read or scrolled this far, please drop me a line.
Stay well,
Anirban
That Van Gogh Red room one too, pls. Pollution-afflicted.
Always hated getting up early for 7.30 am school.
Is there an age-related effect? In my 50s I'm up with the first birds and human after 2 shots of black.
Welcome back. Very interesting read. I am a morning person and I had always wondered why people have difficulty in waking up early! Now I know.