Well, it seems chocolate is good for math performance. And so are wine and tea. Not to mention coffee (that keeps you awake late at night while you finish your homework). And why leave it at that? Sugar is good for the brain (it requires a lot of calories to run a brain properly).
I really wonder what the statistics of these studies really look like. Peter Coles usually has good blog posts about statistics. Here is a sobering post on the general issues one needs to consider.
For other fun aspects of human performance, you might want to read this post on information in your body (particularly counting number of megabytes of information you can store).
Yeah, I have a very speculative hypothesis, somebody should run a research project on it: the occasional consumption of food by humans is beneficial for the process of knowledge discovery. I mean, if you think about it: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, they all ate food. I’m sure even Witten does!
Hi Bee:
Wow, we must be communicating via telepathy. I had that same wild hypothesis, but was afraid of voicing it. I’m so glad that this idea is out there….
I’m not so sure about Witten.
Seriously: I am willing to bet that in 10 years it will be shown conclusively that drinking any kind of alcohol in even small amounts destroys your brain. For coffee, it will probably take a lot longer.
I’d celebrate these claims as well (and ignore the fact that the research is about the age group 70-74), but I’m afraid this research is in the same category of all the emails I keep getting about new theories of the universe…I think if some claims sound too good to be true, chances are they aren’t.
“Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests”.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation [1]. I might believe the conclusion if random participants were force fed chocolate (it might not actually require any force) and then performed better at maths.
[1] http://xkcd.com/552/
Do I need an excuse to inform you here that I have written some rebuttal of your argumentation that the universe is probably not a quantum computer? Comments there are already closed, but it seems not fair to put some argument on the web without informing you about it.
See http://ilja-schmelzer.de/glet/LorentzInvarianceArgument.php
Sincerely yours,
Ilja
Ilja, if you read carefully you’ll find that I did not say you cannot have LI as accidental symmetry in low energy. In fact, there are many examples of fields in 2dim which have linear dispersion relations at low energy, and therefore are described by relativistic effective field theory. One example of recent interest is graphene.
What I did say is that for a complicated theory in 4dimensions, with sufficiently large field content, this becomes very difficult to achieve. Not impossible, but difficult enough to become the first thing to check in your discrete model, in my opinion. I have the impression that this point is not emphasized enough, or even largely ignored, in the community exploring those models, which is one reason I wrote that post.
Ok, but my main reason for writing this page was the argument about the Lorentz-violating relevant operators. I think my arguments show that they are even necessary if one wants to obtain local Lorentz symmetry in the low energy limit.
I have indeed largely ignored this question, because I have considered it as solvable, given that Lorentz symmetry (4d) appears in almost every wave equation. Other problems (like the implementation of the weak gauge group into my ether model at ilja-schmelzer.de/clm and the quantization of fermion fields) have been more urgent.
Now, having solved them in a sufficiently nice way, I can care more about these less urgent problems of my model.
Tarun:
Even more suspect is the data collection method: the subjects filled in their own information. Uhh, wouldn’t 70-year olds with memory problems both NOT remember how much chocolate/wine/tea they had AND do poorly on cognitive tests…