Playing Tetris for a few minutes a day could help you kick an addiction

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/playing-tetris-for-a-few-minutes-a-day-could-help-you-kick-an-addiction-081315.html

The study was conducted by psychologists from Plymouth University and Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Over a seven-day period, the researchers observed and recorded information on participants with varying addictions. Some of these included dependencies on drugs, cigarettes, food, alcohol, coffee, and sex.

The study consisted of 31 undergraduates ranging in age from 18 to 27. Each participant was prompted via text message to record and report their cravings seven times a day. They were encouraged to report even more if they wanted to. Out of the 31 participants, 15 were asked to play Tetris on an iPod for three minutes before reporting their craving levels again.

The researchers found that playing Tetris had a tangible effect on the cravings that participants were feeling. “Playing Tetris decreased craving strength for drugs, food, and activities from 70% to 56%. This is the first demonstration that cognitive interference can be used outside the lab to reduce cravings for substances and activities other than eating,” said Jackie Andrade, who is a professor at Plymouth University who helped conduct the study…

http://www.tetrisfriends.com/games/NBlox/game.php

Flamenco dancer performs amidst art installation of 745 pairs of red shoes

http://www.trust.org/item/20150612203704-8sjrx/

Spanish flamenco dancer Maria del Mar Suarez “La Chachi”, 34, performs amidst an art installation of 745 pairs of female red shoes, put on display by Mexican visual artist Elina Chauvet to protest against the gender violence and femicide, at La Constitucion Square in Malaga, southern Spain, June 12, 2015.

Can country music drive you to suicide?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC521600/

BMJ. 2004 Oct 9
Can country music drive you to suicide?

The Ig Nobel award for medicine—one of the prizes given annually to scientists who have produced unusual research—was given this year to a team of researchers who had found that cities in which radio stations played a higher than average amount of country music had higher than average suicide rates…

“We had hard data showing that cities with higher than average country music radio market share had higher white suicide rates,” he said. African-American suicide rates, he explained, were not affected by the country music market (Social Forces 1992;71: 211-8)…

A biology award went to Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science and his colleagues who discovered that herring allegedly communicate by breaking wind…

Jillian Clarke, of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, won the public health award for her tests of the scientific validity of the “five second rule,” which says that if food dropped on the floor is left for only five seconds, it is safe to eat. Ms Clarke, 17 years old and the youngest Ig Nobel recipient ever, dropped food on all sorts of surfaces at the University of Illinois and then tested the food for bacteria…

The Literature Award went to the American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, “for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.” Pamela Chestek, accepting the award on behalf of her mother, told the audience that the library’s board members wanted to attend but found they “had nothing to wear.” …

The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain won the chemistry award for invention of its Dasani brand of “pure” bottled water—which turned out to be tap water.

The clear winner of the night, however, was the recipient of this year’s peace prize, Daisuke Inoue of Hyugo, Japan. Mr Inoue, who invented the karaoke machine, received this year’s peace award for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.

The stated aim of the prizes is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”. The awards are sometimes veiled criticism (or gentle satire), but are also used to point out that even the most absurd-sounding avenues of research can yield useful knowledge. Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, and they are followed by a set of public lectures by the winners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

Psilocybin May Help Treat Alcoholism, According to New Study

http://cascadiavape.com/2015/08/11/psilocybin-may-help-treat-alcoholism-according-to-new-study/

According to a new study published in Psychopharmacology, psilocybin may be useful in treating alcohol dependence. The research was conducted at the University of New Mexico by a research team including lead author Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, and Dr. Rick Strassman. Yes, that Rick Strassman — the one who performed pioneering DMT research in the 1990s and authored DMT: The Spirit Molecule…

Psilocybin’s early promise in treating alcohol dependence isn’t altogether surprising. Recent studies conducted by Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins University have already showed psilocybin to be effective in combating another hugely addictive substance: tobacco. Johnson’s study, also published in Psychopharmacology, showed incredible results in helping people quit smoking. “The rates of quitting were so high, twice as high as what you typically see with the gold standard medication,” he told Bloomberg.

With the best current smoking cessation drug, varenicline, only 35 percent of people are still tobacco-free after six months. Other treatments, such as nicotine patches or chewing gum, fare even worse. With psilocybin, the six-month success rate is an astounding 80%…

The limitations of these small, preliminary studies should be noted. Both the alcohol and tobacco addiction studies had small sample sizes, and lacked control groups and double-blind methodology. A larger, more robust study design would substantially improve the scientific validity of the findings…

Remembering A Rainy Day In May