Garbage as a Renewable Resource

Cheap alternative energy may be no farther than your nearest landfill.

Mark Redwood has a keen appreciation for garbage.

As a research fellow with the University of Birmingham’s Unit of Functional Bionanomaterials, Redwood has helped develop a process that uses bacteria cultures to convert food waste into hydrogen fuel.

“There are special and yet prevalent circumstances under which microorganisms have no better way of gaining energy than to release hydrogen into their environment," wrote Redwood in a Microbiology Today article. "Microbes such as heterotrophs, cyanobacteria, microalgae, and purple bacteria all produce biohydrogen in different ways."

Redwood and his fellow researchers are hopeful that “waste to energy” processes might give consumers around the world a clean and affordable energy source while reducing the flow of garbage into landfills.

“The world today faces a triple threat of growing waste volumes, declining disposal options, and limited energy resources,” reads the Web site of Biowaste2Energy Ltd., a firm co-founded early 2008 by Redwood’s university research unit and outside agencies to further develop and promote waste-to-energy technology. The site touts the method as one that “dramatically reduces the waste volume, while providing clean energy.”

The Biowaste2Energy process involves two storage tanks, one that houses cultures of fermentative bacteria and another that teems with photosynthetic bacteria. Machines churn the food waste up and pour it into the fermentative-bacteria tank, whose micro-residents munch away and burp quantities of hydrogen for use as fuel.

The fermentative bacteria also emit acid compounds that drain into a photosynthetic bacteria tank, where other bacteria convert the compounds into even more hydrogen for fuel use.
Garry Golden, a futurist and energy consultant, says the process is so simple and involves equipment so portable that homeowners might someday buy waste-to-energy disposal units for their homes and produce their own electricity. Golden estimates that a household with a lot of biodegradable trash might save as much as 20% to 30% on its monthly energy bills.

“People can start extracting energy from their own sources on site,” he says. “You’re looking at more localized production and storage.”

Many villages in Costa Rica already practice a form of waste-to-energy scheme, according to Rachel Tubman, University of Houston future-studies graduate assistant. Tubman has researched villages in which residents truck their homes’ food waste and animals’ excrement into a community tank unit; bacteria and enzymes break it all down into a natural gas that villagers use for heating and cooking. The leftover solid compounds make for a highly nutrient-rich fertilizer.

“It amounts to taking something that is considered the bane of our existence and making it a positive thing,” says Tubman. “In an energy-constrained society, every piece of biomass becomes valuable.”

Golden notes that the United States currently consumes 3.8 trillion kilowatts of electricity a year. He calculates that if the United States converted all 170 million tons of the garbage it currently incinerates or sends to landfills, it would get a yield of 93.9 billion kilowatts of energy a year—2.4% of the current energy need. But even 2.4% could prove to be a substantial saving for many consumers who worry about energy expenses.

“It doesn’t save the world,” he says. “But if GE or some company can design a bioenergy appliance and sell it to homes in America, that is a great way to reduce waste, a great way to reduce the cost of energy, and a great way to improve the environment. There are a lot of positives.” —Rick Docksai

Sources: “Life’s a Gas…and it’s Hydrogen,” by Mark Redwood and Lynne Macaskie. Microbiology Today. Society for General Microbiology. Web site www.sgm.ac.uk.

Biowaste2energy Ltd. Web site www.bw2e.com.

Garry Golden. The Energy Road Map. Web site www.garrygolden.net.

Rachel Tubman, University of Houston. Web site www.uh.edu.

Teens and Cell Phones

Cell phones can be noisy and distracting. But they can also be an aid to learning.

Many schools frown on students using cell phones in the classrooms, but a British study suggests that they reconsider. The mobile technology could in fact be a powerful learning tool.
“We hope that, in the future, mobile phone use will be as natural as using any other technology in school,” says Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, University of Nottingham research fellow and study co-author.

Hartnell-Young and colleagues tracked 331 teens, ages 14 to 16, for nine months in five participating schools whose teachers incorporated “smartphones,” or cell phones with Internet access and other advanced functions, into lesson plans. Students used the smartphones to create short movies, set homework reminders, record their teachers’ readings of poems, time experiments via phone stopwatches, access relevant Web sites, and transfer electronic files between school and home. The study gave the smartphone-enhanced lessons high marks.

“Even pupils were often surprised at the thought that mobile phones could be used for learning,” says Hartnell-Young. “But after the hands-on experiment, almost all pupils said they enjoyed the project and felt more motivated.”

These findings do not surprise Joseph Porus, vice president of market-research firm Harris Interactive, who notes that teens have a deep comfort level with mobile phones. In September, Harris Interactive and telecommunications trade association CTIA co-released a survey of teen phone use in which 51% of the teen respondents said they consider the cell phone a vital means to getting important information.

Nearly one in five respondents (18%) said that the cell phone is a positive influence on their education. Of those who access the Internet on their phones, 24% do so for class-related purposes and 39% do so for national and world news.

Phone Web features are increasingly important, according to the Harris poll. Some teachers collect homework online and answer questions about assignments through e-mail or text-messaging.

“The mobile phone is another form of access to teachers and to help,” Porus says.
The mobile phone can go to less-than-edifying purposes also, however.

Some students at a school in British Columbia school created a “fight club” with scheduled smackdowns that they recorded and uploaded for global sharing. In a Quebec classroom, students acted chaotically so as to provoke their teacher and then recorded his angry outburst for later upload onto YouTube.

According to Emily Noble, president of the Canadian Federation of Teachers, incidents such as these prompted many Canadian school districts to ban students’ use of cell phones altogether.
“While we at the Canadian Federation of Teachers do not object to cell phones, we have serious concerns about their misuse–e.g., to cyberbully, cheat on exams, or just be disruptive in the classroom,” says Noble.

But Noble stressed that many teachers in Canada have been able to “use the technology in a positive way.” At a school in Saskatchewan, eighth and ninth graders reading Todd Strasser’s novel The Wave used cell phones to share thoughts about the book, record and summarize group discussions, share digital art projects, and receive morning homework reminders from their teacher.

“It’s like everything else; you have to be careful about it. There’s proper and improper use,” Noble says. —Rick Docksai

Sources: Joseph Porus, Harris Interactive, www.harrisinteractive.com.

Emily Noble, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, www.ctf-fce.ca.

CTIA, www.ctia.org.

University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk.

Youth Depression and Suicide

Medical advisory warnings may have some nasty side effects.

Warning labels meant to protect young people might be doing them more harm than good, according to a Nationwide Children’s Hospital study on antidepressants and youth suicide rates.
The study finds that suicides of Americans under 20 years old rose 18% between 2003 and 2004—the largest single-year increase in more than 15 years. The rate went back down by a slight 5% from 2004 to 2005.

The spike coincides with U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2003 and 2004 public warnings that antidepressants might trigger “suicidality”—suicidal thoughts and behaviors, short of actual suicide—in young people age 20 and under who use them, though suicidality usually abated after the first few months of treatment. The FDA first alterted consumers to a possible antidepressant–suicidality link in June 2003 when tests suggested increased risk in young consumers of the antidepressant parotexine.

Over the following 14 months, the FDA sponsored studies of all major antidepressants and held public hearings that discussed findings. It concluded that all brands of antidepressants needed to carry a note of caution; a young patient taking them would be 4% more likely to exhibit suicidality.

In October 2004, the agency ordered drug companies to place “black-box” warnings on the inserts of all their antidepressants. Every warning was to say state the increased risks and urge doctors prescribing antidepressants to watch the patients closely for any changes in behavior: “Anyone considering the use of [drug name] or any other antidepressant in a child or adolescent must balance this risk with the clinical need. Patients who are started on therapy should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior.”

The first warnings appeared in 2005. FDA spokeswoman Sandy Walsh told THE FUTURIST that the warnings were meant to make doctors and patients more cautious.

“The FDA’s intent is to fully inform doctors about the risks and benefits of antidepressants, and not to discourage appropriate prescribing,” says Walsh.

But critics say that doctors and patients became too cautious. Nathan Bridge, Nationwide Children’s Hospital study author, suggests that the warnings might have scared some physicians into not prescribing antidepressants and some young children into not taking them. Bridge worries that the grownups’ concerns backfired, with tragic consequences for some young patients who were denied needed treatments.

“That may mean there are more depressed kids who aren’t being diagnosed and being treated, and that may be more at risk for suicide,” says Bridge.

According to FDA data, a young person suffering from depression is 15% more likely to commit suicide than peers not suffering from depression.

Bridge’s concern is not new. In December 2006, Columbia University psychiatry professor John Mann testified at a public FDA hearing that antidepressant prescriptions to young people declined 22% after the black-box warnings were imposed. He added that the best way to help depressed and suicidal patients is to closely monitor them and prescribe drugs whenever appropriate: “We can do more good by encouraging treatment for all depressed children and adults.”

Child psychiatrist Carolyn Robinowitz told the same committee that the black-box label fueled needless fear about the drugs.

“The imposition of the black box label has resulted in unintended negative consequences restricting access to care and adding to risk,” she said.

She argued further that the warnings fueled negative stereotypes about people with depression, and might even shame some depressed persons from acknowledging their depression and seeking help.

“The black box has contributed to further stigmatization of depression, those who suffer from it, and its treatment,” she says.

Despite the criticisms, the FDA expanded the black-box warning in May 2007 to all patients under 24 years old.

Walsh agrees that excess fear of antidepressants can become a serious problem.

“Findings such as these do raise a concern about the unintended consequences,” she says.

But she defended the black-box warnings as a benefit to doctors and patients alike.

“At this time, nothing indicates a need for change in the boxed warning,” she says, “which urges that particular attention is given to patients starting treatment, still good advice.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: Jeff Bridge, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, Ohio. Web site, www.nationwidechildrens.org.

Sandy Walsh, FDA Public Affairs Office. Web site, www.fd.gov.

Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee. December 13, 2006. FDA. Web site, www.fda.gov/cder.

Tomorrow in Brief

Navy Returns to Sail Power

Sails may be making a comeback on ships. Using a giant computer-controlled kite called a skysail, a cargo ship chartered by the U.S. Navy for the Military Sealift Command will move supplies and equipment around the globe. Rising 100 yards into the air, the innovative kite-sail will capture wind to help propel the 400-foot MV Beluga Skysails during long ocean transits, saving an estimated 20%–30% in fuel costs, or about $1,600 per day.

Source: U.S. European Command, www.eucom.mil.

Celebrity Trumps Beauty

Consumers make more of a connection with famous faces than beautiful ones, so marketers are looking more toward the stars to sell their products. A recent study by psychologists Carl Senior and Baldeesh Gakkal of Aston University (Birmingham, U.K.) concluded that the modern brain has become hard-wired to produce emotional reactions to celebrities and the products they endorse. Participants’ responses were measured when exposed to hypothetical ads featuring famous and nonfamous, attractive and average-looking models; fame proved more stimulating. The researchers believe that it doesn’t matter how attractive the celebrity is; consumers are simply more likely to respond to fame than to beauty.

Source: Aston University, Press Office, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, United Kingdom. Web site www.aston.ac.uk.

Space Research Leads to Depression Treatment

A self-guided depression-treatment program developed for astronauts could one day be used for Earthbound sufferers. NASA’s Virtual Space Station, a multimedia program for addressing problems that astronauts may encounter on long-term missions, includes a module to guide space crews through psychosocial challenges when no communication link to a psychologist is available. “While astronauts are not particularly prone to psychological problems, the environment is very demanding,” says project co-investigator and former astronaut Jay Buckey. The treatment program helps the user identify specific problems, set goals to solve them, and brainstorm the steps necessary to reach those goals. Developers believe the program might also benefit rural residents and others without immediate access to mental health care professionals or services.

Source: National Space Biomedical Research Institute, One Baylor Plaza, NA-425, Houston, Texas 77030. Web site www.nsbri.org.

Burials at Sea Benefit Coral Reefs

Cemetery plots are growing increasingly scarce and more people are seeking ways to maintain their eco-friendly lifestyles after they die. One option in the “green burial” movement is to contribute your remains to reef restoration. Eternal Reefs, a company founded by a pair of college roommates inspired during their diving adventures off the Florida Keys, entombs cremated remains in “reef balls” that are then used to help rehabilitate and restore dying reefs and provide new habitats for marine life.

Source: Eternal Reefs Inc., P.O. Box 2473, Decatur, Georgia 30031. Web site www.eternalreefs.com.

Microwaves May “Pump” Water on Moon

When future astronauts need water on the Moon or Mars, they’ll need to go only as far as an outpost where subsurface ice has been pumped out with microwave beams. Materials scientist William Kaukler of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has devised a system for extracting water by shooting beams into the lunar or Martian surface at the poles, where ice has been shown to exist. The microwaves will penetrate and heat the soil; on the Moon, the vacuum environment would percolate the water vapor to the surface, where it would be collected on a plate as ice and then scraped off for human use, either as water or for conversion to hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The key advantage to such a system would be to avoid transporting water from Earth — an expensive proposition.

Source: University of Alabama, Huntsville, University Relations, SKH 321, Huntsville, Alabama 35899. Web site www.uah.edu/news.

Book Reviews

The Emergence of a Global Generation

A maverick pollster explains why the new American Dream is better than the old one.

The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. By John Zogby. Random House, www.atrandom.com. 2008. 235 pages. $26.

In The Way We’ll Be, pollster John Zogby draws exhaustively on the results of his organization’s long-term polling to reveal what trends are guiding the United States into the future. On the one hand, distrust of political leaders and the mainstream media has become highly pervasive, cutting across all age groups. (A 2004 poll of New Yorkers found that almost half believed the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.) On the other hand, the average 18- to 29-year-old also has a heightened social awareness, a genuine appreciation for diversity and multiculturalism, a more personal spiritual sense of the world, and a broader worldview in general, Zogby reports.

In addition, 25% of this age group “think they’ll end up living for some significant period of time in a country other than America,” and they are more aware of (and more interested in) international politics than previous generations have been. The current twenty-somethings are multilateral as well as multicultural and “want a foreign policy as inclusive and embracive as they are,” writes Zogby. “They expect impediments to trade to be removed so they can shop anywhere, and they want developing countries and their peoples protected from predatory multinational corporations and their fiscal policies that hold the world’s poorest people ransom.”

In other words, politicians and CEOs would be wise not to underestimate the under-30 crowd. Zogby re-dubs the millennial generation the “First Globals,” calling them “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” As he charts their values and beliefs, he repeatedly makes the case that “First Globals are also the most cosmopolitan age group in America, the most international, and the one most concerned about the environment and human rights.”

According to Zogby, First Globals are also proving themselves to be more conscientious consumers, demanding greater honesty and accountability from businesses, political leaders, the media, and themselves. “If there is a single element driving the operating manual of our lives more than any other, it is the demand after so many years of falsity — in products, claims, and promises — that things finally get back to being honest and actual,” he writes.

Despite the relentless fusillade from a multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising industry, First Globals aren’t nearly as materialistic or as “branded” as they were conditioned to become. On the contrary, the conspicuous consumption of previous generations of nouveau-riche is being supplanted by the trappings of a more socially responsible lifestyle, Zogby asserts.

This doesn’t mean that Americans are raising a generation of liberals. What it shows is that the old American Dream has shifted away from materialism and toward what Zogby calls “secular spiritualism,” the search for inner tranquility, a tendency to look for deeper meaning from life. He writes, “Just as Thoreau looked out at the landscape of industrial age America and decried its dehumanizing effects, so these Secular Spiritualists have looked out at the landscape of an America obsessed with consumption and have decided that it isn’t working for them.”

Of course, raw data can be interpreted many different ways. As Zogby points out, “polling is not a crystal ball. Despite our best efforts and the most pristine methodologies, the unpredictability of events sometimes gets in the way.” Polling is most useful as a way to discover emerging trends and changes in cultural values and opinions. Polls don’t determine future outcomes, but they can provide strong indications of what’s to come. Zogby issues a caveat that expresses this nicely: “All I know for sure is what the polls and surveys tell me, and all they can tell me is what people are thinking and intending at the moment the questions are asked.”

That said, when he starts referring to baby boomers as “Woodstockers” and Gen Xers as “Nikes,” it comes across as a way to maintain literary consistency, rather than an inspired method of recategorizing the generations based on polling data. And it’s possible that, by the end, older readers may find themselves experiencing a bit of a backlash toward Zogby’s “favorite child”: a schadenfreude to see the archetypal First Global living in his or her parents’ basement ten years from now, watching grainy political videos on YouTube and muttering about international government conspiracies.

On the other hand, Zogby’s upbeat vision of the future provides a nice counterbalance to doom-and-gloom prophesying. Why argue with the data? Better to take a deep breath and relax. As it turns out, the kids are doing just fine. And the rest of us aren’t doing too bad either. — Aaron M. Cohen

Hope in the State of the Future

2008 State of the Future. By Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project, www.millennium-project.org. 2008. 104 pages plus a CD-ROM containing 6,300 pages. $49.95.

The Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations has released a State of the Future report every year since 1996. This latest edition draws upon all 12 predecessors and incorporates findings from 229 new contributing futurists, business planners, and scientists.

The report identifies 15 Global Challenges that experts conclude will demand worldwide cooperation to resolve; summarizes, in a State of the Future Index, data collected over the last 20 years to project five areas in which the human species will gain ground and five in which it will lose ground; and proposes ways for new systems of communication and information-sharing to coordinate global action necessary to address the 15 Global Challenges.

The report’s authors bring together much of the contributors’ research findings through a survey method called Real-Time Delphi Technique, in which participants answer questionnaires in one year and are allowed to revise their answers at any time thereafter. The 15 Global Challenges are the results tallied from a Delphi survey ongoing since 1996; the State of the Future Index used a Real-Time Delphi Technique survey dating back to 2006.

The report gives reason to look forward to substantially reduced world poverty, rising literacy, and vast increases in worldwide Internet availability and use. Yet it also finds much to fear: As much as half the world might witness violence and upheaval due to rising energy and food costs, unstable governments, climate change, water shortages, desertification, and increasing migrations of refugees.

The survey participants find hope for solving these problems, however, in ever-evolving communications technologies and in government “foresight units.” Communications technologies such as the Internet enable people across the globe to share ideas, cooperate on initiatives, and allocate resources more easily than ever before. Foresight units keep public officials aware of worldwide developments that need to be considered when formulating policies. The report spotlights the present foresight units of 10 individual governments, and urges other governments to form foresight units as well. The authors hope that those units might connect to each other and to partners in the nonprofit and business sectors to form a worldwide grid of information sharing, idea development, and strategy implementation.

“This does not mean world government; it means world governance — civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules,” the report states.

Additional international coordination systems might target the specific challenges of sustainable energy policies: a Global Energy Network to link energy experts and a Global Energy Information System to serve as a knowledge base for information about energy. Energy and environmental matters in general merit special consideration, since ecological problems factor into many armed conflicts.

“A new global system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of energy options for decision making is urgently needed,” the report states.

The 2008 State of the Future report is an ambitious meeting of research and vision, presenting a grand-scale sweep of today’s world and its difficulties. It puts forth blueprints for an ambitious mobilization of world-conscious citizens and governments across the globe. That mobilization is a powerful break from the squabbles that feed the world-news sections of today’s newspapers. It becomes clear that the contributing researchers hope for a new and better world. Anyone who shares their hope will find the 2008 State of the Future report a welcome resource. — Rick Docksai

Reinventing Morality

By Patrick Tucker

Evolutionary biology and neuroscience are adding to our understanding of a historically unscientific area.

Morality may be something different for everyone; it may be the set of rules handed down by God to Moses on stone tablets, or the system in which karma is passed through the Dharma. But morality is also a decision-making process, one that plays out in the brain in the same way a mechanical decision-making process plays out on a computer. Clerics, theologians, and, in the last century, anthropologists have put forward various answers to the riddle of how our species stumbled upon the concept of goodness. Now, neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists are adding to that understanding. Discoveries in these fields have the potential to achieve something remarkable in this century: an entirely new, science-based understanding of virtue and evil.

Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds (Ecco, 2006) and director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University, is at the forefront of the emerging scientific discussion of morality. David Poeppel of the University of Maryland is on the cutting edge of today’s brain and neuroscience research. I spoke with both of them about what science can contribute to the human understanding of good and bad.

The first thing I discovered is that applying a scientific approach to a murky, loaded issue like morality requires understanding the problem in material terms. You have the event, in this case the moral decision. Then you have the space where the event plays out, the brain. Some aspects of the decision-making process are fluid and unique to the individual. To form a crude and an unoriginal analogy, this would be like the software code that the brain processes to reach decisions about what is morally permissible and what is not. Other aspects are fixed, like hardware.

Marc Hauser is an expert on the former.

Moral Grammar

A great example of moral-writing software is culture. Cultural influences on moral decision making can include everything from the laws that govern a particular society to the ideas about pride, honor, and justice that play out in a city neighborhood to the power dynamics of a given household. Religion, upbringing, gender, third-grade experiences dealing with bullies, and so on all contribute lines of code to an individual’s moral software. For this reason, no two moral processes will be identical. Academics have given this phenomenon a fancy name: moral relativism. The theory holds that because morality is transferred from groups to individuals in the form of traditions, institutions, codes, etc., everyone will have a different idea of good and bad.

But what if there are limitations to the spectrum of variation? What if, beneath the trappings of culture and upbringing, there really is such a thing as universal morality? If such a thing existed, how would you go about proving it? Enter Marc Hauser, whose research is adding credence to the notion of a universal goodness impulse.

According to Hauser, the human brain learns right from wrong the same way it learns language. The vast majority of the world’s languages share at least one thing in common: a system of guidelines for usage. This is called grammar. Just as languages have rules about where to put a subject, an adverb, and a predicate in a sentence, so too every culture has a set of guidelines to teach people how to make moral decisions in different situations. So just as learning a language means learning not only words, but also a system for putting the words together, the same is true for morality; there are very specific “commandments” that are unique to every culture, but there are also softer usage guidelines. People who have mastered the moral guidelines of their particular culture have what some might call principles or scruples. Hauser calls this a moral grammar.

“A mature individual’s moral grammar enables him to unconsciously generate and comprehend a limitless range of permissible and obligatory actions within the native culture, to recognize violations when they arise, and to generate intuitions about punishable violations,” he writes in his book. “Once an individual acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker.”

Hauser has spent his career studying how people from different backgrounds and cultures rely on different grammars to make moral decisions. About three years ago, he put up a survey Web site called the Moral Sense Test, which is still operating today. Since its establishment, some 300,000 people from around the world have logged on. Participants are asked to answer a series of so-called trolley problems to reveal their unique moral decision-making processes.

The quintessential trolley problem goes something like this: A group of five people is on a train track unaware that a runaway trolley is heading toward them. One person is on a separate track, equally oblivious to what’s going on. If you’re in a control room overlooking the train yard, is it morally permissible to pull a lever and divert the train away from the five people onto the track with the one person, thereby saving the five and killing the one? Or is it morally preferable to take no action and allow the trolley to continue along its predestined path?

“Each question targets some kind of psychological distinction,” says Hauser. “For example, we’re very interested in the distinction between action and omission when both lead to the same consequence.… It’s an interesting distinction because it plays out in many areas of biomedical technology and experiences.”

Surveys such as these aren’t new. But Hauser’s Web-based survey model allows him to ask these questions of people who originate from all sorts of cultural, economic, and educational points of view, as opposed to polling the opinions of a handful of Ivy League undergrads.

“There’s going to be that kind of variation culturally,” he says. “But what the science is trying to say is Look, could the variation we observe today be illusory? Could there be real regularity, universals that underpin that variation fundamental to how the brain works?”

Though the Moral Sense Test is ongoing, it is adding significantly to an understanding of moral reasoning across different cultures. Among Hauser’s most interesting findings: People who don’t adhere to a specific religion and people who do are remarkably similar in the way they make moral decisions.

“This is independent of the benefits that people obtain from being associated with religion; I have nothing to say about that,” he insists. “This is more a question of … does having a religious background really change the nature of these intuitive judgments. The evidence we’ve accumulated suggests, no.” His research shows that people who are religious and people who claim to be atheists show the same moral patterns and answer the same way when they’re presented with a whole host of moral dilemmas. Where they diverge, says Hauser, is when the question touches on political or topical issues about which people are likely to have pre-formed and not necessarily educated opinions.

This is one area where he hopes moral science can make a real difference.

“If you ask most people, Do you think stem-cell research is morally good or morally bad, many people will say bad,” says Hauser. “But then you ask, what is a stem cell? Most people won’t have a clue. What they’ve often done, they’ve masted stem-cell research onto something else, [such as] killing a baby. If killing a baby is bad then stem-cell research is bad. So that’s a matter of using a moral problem one is familiar with and using it to judge a new case that one is not familiar with. We do that all the time…. What science should be doing is trying to educate us, and say Look, the blastocyst is a cluster of cells that stem-cell research is focusing on … nothing like a baby. It’s the potential, with lots of change and development, to become a baby. But it’s not a baby. There’s an onus on researchers to educate. In the absence of education, what people do is examine moral cases in terms of what they’re familiar with.”

He’s received a mixed reaction to his findings. Some people, he says, see the work as artificial, that what morality is really about is how we behave. In other words, according to some, morality can’t be judged on the basis of how a person answers a survey, but on what that person does in real life.

In the future, new technologies like virtual reality will test this hypothesis. But first, researchers need to learn more about how the process plays out in the brain.

The Moral Hardware

In keeping with our computer–brain analogy, some aspects of the moral decision-making process are fixed; namely, the platform on which this process occurs. You might call this the hardware, the physical brain itself. We all process moral decisions based on different assumptions or beliefs, but the process happens in the same place for each of us, an area in the front of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is where our emotional experiences — religious, traumatic, joyous — connect with our higher-level social decision making to give us a sense of good or bad.

So now that science has found the region involved in moral decisions, how long before some Silicon Valley start-up gives us a machine to read good or ill intentions, a veritable evil detector?

Not anytime in the foreseeable future. The human brain is an object of unfathomable complexity. To imagine that it might suddenly be rendered as transparent and simple as the items in an Excel spreadsheet is to commit hubris. This is why David Poeppel of the University of Maryland likes to keep expectations realistic. He studies language in the brain. Just as Hauser is focused on the language of morality, Poeppel is focused on how vibrations in the ear become abstractions. It’s next to impossible, he says, to see how a brain formulates big abstractions, like Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. He hopes one day to understand the neural processing of words like dog or cat.

Poeppel’s current work involves magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that measures the brain’s electrical signals in real time. He was kind enough to invite THE FUTURIST to watch some experimentation. We found him in a lab with some of his brightest doctoral students, several gallons of liquid nitrogen, a $4 million MEG machine, and a girl named Elizabeth — who was having her brain activity, her inner-most thoughts, displayed on a big bank of monitors.

It looked like squiggles.

“What we’re looking at are the electrical signals her brain is giving off as she responds to certain stimuli,” Poeppel told me. In the case of Elizabeth, the stimuli were blips on a monitor and ping noises. The spikes and squiggles on the graph indicated that she was “seeing” the blips, without her having to make any other signal.

Poeppel doesn’t believe we’ll ever be able to hook people to a machine and get a complete transcript of their thinking. “We aren’t capable of that kind of granularity,” he says. But what his — and his students’ — experiments with MEG do show is the brain reacting to stimuli in real time, which can later reveal which parts of the brain react to which stimuli and how much electricity those regions throw off.

The way the brain reads little blips may not seem to be correlated with morality, but it is. Returning to the brain computer analogy, Poeppel says that the moral rules we follow, the impulses that tell us when to push the button and divert the trolley and when not to, are set in a sort of default position when we’re born, just like the default settings on your PC. “Those are constant, immutable. They form the basis of morality. And then the switches are set to particular values as a function of experience. There’s a close interaction between the universality (meaning the brain hardware) and cultural specificity (the software).”

One day, MEG research, trolley surveys, and other aspects of moral science will reveal the key aspects of that correlation.

Amazingly, even though neuroscience is still in its infancy, it’s already yielding insights into moral issues, such as race bias. According to Poeppel, studies have shown that “people make decisions that reflect race biases even when they’re aware of what they’re doing.” Race bias is a reaction that rises from lived experience. What MEG, fMRI, and other neuro-imaging techniques give us is a picture for how those experiences change the physical brain and how the physical brain recreates, reimagines, recomputes them all the time.

“Does this reflect very deeply imbedded mechanisms of decision making? If you’re aware of it, can you neutralize it, can you override it and reeducate the system? Of course you can. The brain is plastic. It changes all the time. That’s what learning is. But we still don’t have a real explanatory theory for how that works.” He adds, “It’s an area where we will see progress in the years ahead.”

In terms of mysteries of morality, that progress will likely take the form of more questions than answers.

Moral Science and Your Future

A common reaction to the radical breakthroughs that seem to occur daily in neuroscience is impatience for ever greater and more important breakthroughs. If we know what lying looks like under fMRI (goes this line of thinking), when will we be able to inoculate against deceit? If we can diagnose the roots of racism, when will we be able to predict which student will go on a violent shooting spree? If we know that bias has something to do the with the amygdala, when will we be able to see it on our computer screens?

The emerging science of morality will not relieve us of the hard work of examining our own motivations and impulses. But it will present us with a lot more data. As this line of inquiry progresses, as new neural-imaging techniques, new technologies like virtual reality come to bear on this problem, we will likely lose certainty about what is right and wrong rather than gain it.

People answering trolley problems will surely give different answers when they’re allowed to “live” the survey in a virtual-reality setting, when they can see the trolley, hear it approach, meet a computer-graphics generated version of the person to be saved or squashed. When we can view that decision-making process using fMRI, MEG, or some other brain-imaging technique not yet in existence, we may be able to see how slightly different firing patterns play out in different decisions. We’ll examine people’s actions in light of their brain activity and reach new understandings, and probably all sorts of hasty conclusions as well.

More importantly, and controversially, the science of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new, richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of consequences. We probably won’t like what we see.

Those awkward realizations may be the greatest value of moral science.

Consider that we’re called upon to make moral decisions daily. Every so often, we’re given an important one, a decision that will radically affect someone else’s life. Sometimes the decision comes masked as a professional matter, as it did for U.S. sheriff Tom Dart, who, when tasked with evicting individuals whose only crime had been renting from a landlord who had defaulted on his mortgage, decided against action and briefly suspended such evictions in Cook County, Illinois. Sometimes the choice comes in a more dramatic form, as in the case of Wesley Autrey, a New York man who jumped onto a set of train tracks to save a stranger from a speeding subway.

The moral actions of Dart and Autrey strike us as exceptional in their selflessness. But such feats of heroism are the products of the same moral decision-making process that occurs in each of us. When we are called upon to commit to such an act, we first make the decisions that are easiest for us. Our faith (or lack there of), upbringing, official job titles, obligations to our bosses or clients, and our various experiences justify action in the interests of self-preservation and in accordance with convention.

But suppose we were each given a better, more sophisticated understanding of the root of morality, its universal core. We suddenly have the opportunity to examine, perhaps even experience, the other option and explore our emotional aversion to it. We suddenly have a new tool to call upon, our private knowledge of the neurological decision-making process. We play the choice out differently, possibly picturing the person on the other end of the problem, and we reach a different conclusion and commit to a different action.

Something has happened. Insight into the moral deliberative method has yielded a result that is more inline with a broader, more rational, and surely more accurate understanding of what is good. The process has been improved.

The future has changed.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Cyborgs Among Us

Science is daily gaining new insights into how the brain works. That growing field of knowledge is already coming into play in the world around us.

• Washington University medical students used fMRI to show that children use more of their brains and different portions of their brains than adults do when they perform word tasks.
• A group of Japanese researchers from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, working with researchers from the Honda Research Institute in Saitama, have used fMRI data to program a prosthetic hand to mimic the movements of a real hand.
• Perhaps most remarkable, researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated that fMRI can detect lies or truth more accurately than polygraphs.

— Patrick Tucker

David Poeppel, Master of Synthetic Telepathy

University of Maryland neuroscientist David Poeppel, along with researchers at University of California, Irvine, and other schools, is part of a $4 million U.S. Army grant to achieve what the Army is calling synthetic telepathy. This sounds like something out of Hollywood, but, says Poeppel, electronic telepathy is absolutely possible so long as “communication” is understood to be electrical signals rather than words.

“Suppose you tap out two rhythms,” says Poeppel. “I train you to get really good at tapping out those particular two rhythms, so you can do it mentally. You have motor memory connected to those two rhythms. That can give a big signal (readable via MEG). If I can extract that, I have a signal I can work with and send it.” All mental thoughts create electrical signals.

The experimenters hope to train subjects to make those signals fire in patterns that can convey information, like Morse code. The code could conceivably be picked up by a sensor trained to focus on a particular electromagnetic frequency and then sent to a computer and resent to another sensor, allowing for something like helmet-to-helmet telepathic communication.

How else will neuroscience affect our lives in the decades ahead? Prescription medications for mental health will be far more effective than those currently available, says Poeppel. We’ll treat most sight or hearing loss with brain prostheses like the cochlear implant. We’ll discover the real roots and effects of mental illness, and mental disorders will become as mundane as a common sports injury and will be treated as such. Our cognitive functioning will become far clearer and better understood.

According to Poeppel, the number of people going into the field (the Society of Neuroscience boasted some 38,000 members in October 2007) guarantees a “full frontal assault” on the mysteries of the brain in the years ahead. — Patrick Tucker

A Brave New Pyschocivilzed Society

Wildly optimistic notions about the potential of neuroscience aren’t new. In the 1960s and 1970s, famed neuroscientist José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado predicted that innovations in cybernetics and brain anatomy would lead to a “psychocivilized society.”

Delgado’s experiments with cybernetic brain implants in monkeys, apes, and even cows were revolutionary for their time. In one famous instance, he was able to stop a charging bull by sending a radio signal into a tiny electrode receiver (a stimoceiver) implanted in the animal’s caudate nucleus, an area of the brain that controls voluntary movement.

In another experiment, he put several small macaque monkeys in a cage with an aggressive male macaque that had similarly wired with a stimoceiver to his caudate nucleus. Also in the cage was a lever that — when activated — sent a signal to the implant. Delgado describes the results of the experiment in his book Physical Control of the Mind, writing, “A female monkey named Elsa soon discovered that Ali’s [the male] aggressiveness could be inhibited by pressing the lever, and when Ali threatened her, it was repeatedly observed that Elsa responded by lever pressing. Her attitude of looking straight at the boss was highly significant because a submissive monkey would not dare to do so, for fear of immediate retaliation.… Although Elsa did not become the dominant animal, she was responsible for blocking many attacks against herself and for maintaining a peaceful coexistence within the whole colony.”

In the late 1960s, Delgado was outspoken in his assertions that neuroscience, and particularly the suppression of urges through electrical stimulation, could lead to a world without war, strife, crime, or even cruelty.

“We are only at the beginning of our experimental understanding of the inhibitory mechanisms of behavior in animals and man, but their existence has already been well substantiated. It is clear that manifestations as important as aggressive responses depend not only on environmental circumstances but also on their interpretation by the central nervous system where they can be enhanced or totally inhibited by manipulating the reactivity of specific intracerebral structures,” he wrote. — Patrick Tucker

Marketing a More-Healthful Future: A Moderate Revolution

By John Sweeney

Advertisers have cleverly coaxed us to supersize our waistlines, while urban planners and a knowledge-based economy have removed the necessity for us to move around. For a fitter future, we’ll need the willpower to reverse these trends.

One future of fitness may be tied to a pill that simulates the body’s response to exercise. Just swallow it once a day and you’ll have a healthy body-mass index, even if you munch chips on your couch from morning to night. Doctors may never prescribe such a pill, as much as you might want it, because they know physical activity and healthful eating habits carry irreplaceable benefits.

That is why I expect the real future of fitness to be one based on exercise and diet. The problem is how to get people to subscribe to that future. How do we create a mass movement toward healthier behavior? I believe it is a marketing problem as much as a medical one. Based on my experience in advertising and marketing, I offer 10 trends and their implications for the year 2020.

1. Weighty Food Inventions

The best marketing minds of this generation have made cars more luxurious, but they have also made our foods and drinks more caloric year after year. Starbucks began as a way to enjoy the coffeehouse experience in America. A “tall” (small) coffee at your local Starbucks has just five calories and no fat or carbs. The brilliant inventions of new kinds of coffee experiences led to the glorious drink called the Caramel Macchiato. It features 240 calories with whole milk, 10 grams of fat, and 28 carbs. Suddenly, a coffee break takes on new dimensions for the waistline.

The CEO of Burger King ordered that no fewer than 30 new products would be offered each year. His first new product was called the Enormous Omelet Sandwich; it boosted breakfast sales by 20% and weighed in at an amazing 760 calories.

Implications for 2020: The brilliance of human invention will continue to create extraordinary chances to gain and lose calories. You can’t regulate the imagination, so consumers will have to depend on willpower. This is hard to do as a lone individual, but much easier as part of a tidal movement. Health and fitness promotion will need to draw on the inventiveness of marketing professionals to reverse a dangerously weighty trend in the food industries.

2. Portions: Rightsizing Food

It is a marketing truism that it is easier to get more money from an existing customer than to try and find a new one. In that respect, we have made it easy to go from a 260-calorie hamburger to a 560-calorie Big Mac, because the hamburger buyers already existed — they just got “supersized.”

Despite a public-service campaign that tells you to “avoid foods larger than your fist,” researchers Young & Nestle in The American Journal of Public Health reported the following startling results: “The largest excess over USDA standards (700%) occurred in the cookie category, but cooked pasta, muffins, steaks and bagels exceeded USDA standards by 480%, 333%, 224% and 195% respectively.”

Naturally, the market is filled with new products that must please the consumer to survive. Cold Stone Creamery started in Tempe, Arizona, in 1988 with a new kind of “Super Premium” ice cream. Its interpretation of a chocolate ice cream cup is called Chocolate Devotion and includes not just chocolate ice cream, but also chocolate chips, a brownie, and fudge wrapped into a massive arrangement of caloric wonderment. From a single store in 1988, there are now 1,350 stores throughout America.

Implications: Controlling size and portions of food offerings may require an intervention. Government regulations may require restaurants to provide clearer statements about the calories on menu offerings. There will be more packaging of foods with proper portions for healthy living. It will be an enormous new category. As the future fitness movement accelerates, transparency will be more than a regulation; it will be a requirement by consumers.

3. Transforming Youth Sports

There was a time when youth sports meant having some idle time on the neighborhood sandlot. Today, there are fewer school teams, a decline in daily physical fitness class in middle and high school, and a major increase in the intensity and costs of elite youth sports leagues. These leagues operate separately from the school system and cost parents thousands of dollars in fees and a tremendous commitment in transportation and time.

The level of commitment required to participate has led to the need for kids to focus on single sports in order to compete. Some doctors think this phenomenon is behind the epidemic of repetitive stress injuries, as young athletes turn sports into a 365-day-a-year passion.

The other side of this trend, though, is the effect on the average kid. An estimated 70% of young athletes drop out of sports by age 14. And for the vast masses of semi-coordinated folks, sports represents an elite world of competitive frenzy rather than a sustainable fitness regimen and lifelong pursuit of health. This is not the message that sports needs to send at a time of obesity epidemics.

Implications: Physical education must return as a major priority for schools, as research has shown the importance of physical fitness in academic achievement. Tomorrow’s phys-ed classes will focus on maximum exercise in very tight amounts of time and space. The competitive demands of youth sports will continue to accelerate even as social concern about obsessed parents and repetitive stress injuries mount.

4. The Power of Advertising

The traditional measures of advertising’s effectiveness — reach, frequency, and impressions — begin to take on an ominous dimension when the money promoting broccoli is compared with the amount promoting french fries. According to a number of studies, sugar colas can be traced as a major source of the obesity crisis. When the leading cola companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on commercials, the total becomes extraordinary over the lifetime of a child. Add fast food, sugar-coated cereals, snacks, and beer for adults, and the amounts are truly staggering.

While it is always possible to run commercials with different content next to the big-fat, big-sugar executions, there is absolutely no way to favorably compare the share of voice in the marketplace. And food advertising is often wrapped up in highly effective merchandising strategies, such as movie superhero action figures sold with your food or popular clothing incorporating beverage brands.

The FTC reported in July 2008 that the major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion on promoting products to kids in the United States in 2006. The promotions included the Internet, TV tie-ins, sweepstakes, games, and more. In contrast, investment in nutrition education goes where it may be least effective: classrooms. An Associated Press report reviewing studies of nutrition education programs—on which the federal government spent more than $1 billion in 2007 — found very little success in combating childhood obesity.

Implications: There will be calls for dramatic increases in restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods. Food companies will offer some healthier options. Recent moves in this direction: McDonald’s adds salads and Coca-Cola adds bottled water. The results will be mixed, but it will be a world where consumers have healthy, affordable options with easy access.

Nutrition education programs need to take a tip from advertisers: Go where the audiences are and use the pitches that are most likely to succeed rather than simply revising classroom curricula.

5. The Video Influence

A few decades ago, there were only three major channels on a television screen and no remote controls. Today’s world includes home entertainment centers that rival movie theaters, computer screens that bring the Internet and video games of fantasy sports far more intriguing than the original, and these liquid screen, graphic paradises require little from us but the movement of a few fingers. Recent studies show people entranced by a screen of some kind over 500 minutes a day. And that’s more than eight hours of sedentary living before any recruitment for fitness can even start.

Implications: Technology will continue to make the sedentary life ever more alluring. While there will be innovative products to promote fitness, like Wii, it is ultimately a matter of a person’s willpower whether to use them.

6. Fast Food, Faster Food, Ubiquitous Food

Remember the days of old? Only one vending machine within a mile? And that one needed exact change. Not that anyone would even consider drinking a soft drink in the morning. Today we are a world where vending machines can accept even the most mangled currency, and they await us around every corner, even in public schools.

The same can be said for the sheer number of fast-food restaurants and self-service gasoline snack shops. They have multiplied by the thousands and added caloric breaks by the millions. Ulysses had to pass the Sirens just once in his Odyssey. We pass them several times a day—day after day after day.

Implications: Expect an explosion of restrictions in public buildings and public spaces on the sale of unhealthy products. The average store, though, will feature the latest in both positive and negative products.

7. Compressed Architecture

Compression as a marketing idea is wonderful in certain consumer categories. Thanks to time compression, I can get my pictures developed or prescription eyeglasses changed in just an hour. The idea of compression becomes a bit more troubling when it comes to space.

Thanks to the rise of real-estate values, architects have found ways to put hundreds more houses into developments. These new designs feature maximum floor space with minimal green space. Parks and sidewalks are designed out at certain price points and presented as decorative ambience rather than as open places for play and recreation. The new world of suburban living is designed around accessibility rather than fitness—driving rather than walking. We have escalator-enhanced shopping malls and walking-restricted golf courses, so we all can gain weight but do so with maximum convenience.

Implications: A countertrend against automobile-dominated habitats is rising in many communities. But while more parks and trails will be required in clustered communities, the return to plentiful land in urban areas is simply not possible. The rise in fitness activities that require little space, such as pilates, will explode in popularity by necessity. There won’t be room for anything else.

8. Combating Rising Life Stress

Not just leisure activities, but work also has become increasingly sedentary and time-stressed. The brave new world of hypercompetitive global business requires longer working hours. Business Week reports that 31% of college-educated male workers are grinding through more than 50 hours a week at work.

Furthermore, studies show that 40% of American adults are getting less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and 60% of meals are rushed. Given that work in general is now far more white collar than blue collar, it is a world of longer work hours sitting in office chairs typing at computers, and fewer parks to visit because of compressed architecture.

In other words, all our brilliant inventions work together to keep us tired and sitting. Being stressed by time makes it harder to make time for unstressing, as stalling membership rates in health clubs and other fitness adventures would indicate.

Implications: Corporations will likely make major investments in fitness programs for their employees, justifying these investments by adding requirements for healthier lifestyles. These requirements will be tested in court, but the final refinements will still support a more fit employee. Yes, you’ll work long hours, but a visit to the gym will be part of your work schedule.

9. Aging and Fitness

“Age” is the one “inevitable” category to consider in the health and fitness future. People in developed societies are, quite simply, getting older. In 2010, the majority of the population in the United States will be at least 45 years old.

The effects of aging are well documented: metabolism slows, arthritis invades, flexibility declines, and waistlines expand. While this may be true, it does not explain the global increase in obesity. All of the previous trends discussed have contributed to this situation.

Implications: Societies throughout the world are getting older, and low-impact activities like walking, gardening, birding, and swimming will find increasing popularity. The older audience will be one of the anchors for the new fitness movement in 2020.

10. Toward an Ethos of Health

Yes, there will be a fitness revolution, but it will be low-key and pedestrian in its execution. Whether or not hundreds of millions of dollars are spent marketing broccoli and exercise, the ultimate decision to lead healthier lifestyles will be up to individuals.

Unfortunately, the solution to the obesity crisis lies in the commitment to fitness and the sweat equity and diet restraint that creates a healthy body. It is a commitment that comes from individual determination rather than a catchy ad campaign. But it is, ultimately, our path back to normality.

Implications: We will ultimately exercise more and eat better because it is the societal norm. In the same way that social expectations guide our grooming, language, and dress, so will these norms and expectations quietly govern our general fitness. The epidemic rise in morbid obesity will subside because it is no longer acceptable. That — and not whiz-bang technology — will be the source of the next fitness revolution.

The year 2020 will not dawn on a culture of fitness fanatics. Instead, it will dawn on a general ethic of tolerable fitness through general diet restraint and moderate exercise. It will take an enormous list of both regulations and voluntary adjustments to make it work, but a shared sense of the national need to achieve a moderately healthy lifestyle will be the key to one of the quietest revolutions in history.

About the Author

John Sweeney is a Distinguished Professor and head of the advertising sequence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His address is School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Campus Box 3365, Carroll Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599. Telephone 919-962-4074; fax 919-962-0620.

Why Education Must Get Physical

By Kenneth W. Harris

Positive trends toward a healthier future society include innovative fitness equipment and activities that are appealing to adults. But the fitness ethos must begin earlier in life, and education should reintroduce physical activity for children, argues a futurist consultant.

The promotion of healthy lifestyles is benefiting from calorie-burning innovations that are almost as numerous as calorie-gaining temptations. One only has to view late-night cable TV for a little while to see an advertisement for some type of exercise equipment promising extraordinary health benefits, such as the Bowflex Home Gym. Games and activities, too, seem more imaginative than ever in promoting exercise. Activities like underwater hockey, bicycle polo, and cardio-tennis combine two or more sports or fitness activities. Active games originally intended for children, like dodgeball and kickball, have become popular with adults.

Many companies, like Country Walkers, Backcountry Access, and Vermont Country Cyclers, offer “exercise tourism” featuring walking, skiing, cycling, or kayaking. Even electronic games are starting to promote exercise, like Dance-Dance Revolution and the suite of games accompanying the Nintendo Wii games system, getting gamers off the couch and moving.

Health and Youth

Organized sports for children and youth in America have largely supplanted the games that kids used to organize and play on their own. Organized sports now start as early as age five and continue through high school, with the less talented gradually dropping out and turning to inactive pursuits, including excessive use of electronic media. Meanwhile, schools’ physical-education programs provide inadequate amounts of physical activity for good health, and more kids rely on motorized transport rather than walking or biking to school. All these trends converge as a major cause of the much discussed childhood obesity epidemic in America.

This focus on elite competitive sports participation rather than lifelong fitness has been particularly bad for girls. While Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments in 1972 caused a revolutionary increase in American girls’ sports participation, it also caused a disproportionate increase in injuries to girls who play sports.

Michael Sokolove, author of Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports (Simon and Schuster, 2008), has documented in heart-breaking fashion the epidemic of ligament tears and concussions in girl soccer players largely caused by playing too many games on too many teams year-round. A key point of the book is that political correctness gets in the way of reform of this unfortunate situation. Groups that ought to be loudly advocating reform are not doing so because of fear that their protest will lead to a retreat from the requirements of Title IX.

Fortunately, advocacy for and implementation of a saner approach to youth sports are starting to appear in disparate quarters. The Web site Momsteam (www.momsteam.com) provides a comprehensive clearinghouse of information for parents of children and youth in sports. Momsteam does not oppose organized youth sports; rather, it seeks to make them fun and inclusive so that they contribute positively to a child’s development.

There is plenty of evidence that physical activity helps children to learn better, but I am not confident that this evidence is enough to turn educational policy around. One reason is that, at least in the United States, the federal No Child Left Behind Act does not require students to meet minimum physical-fitness standards, as it does for reading and mathematics. Consequently, schools are reducing time spent on subjects other than reading and mathematics to assure that their students pass reading and mathematics tests.

Forces Against the Sedentary Lifestyle

The quality of sedentary home entertainment seems to improve continually with no end in sight, and objective time-use studies show that Americans choose to spend a lot of leisure time with electronic media. However, other forces are working against this trend, such as:

• Medical opinion is unanimous that regular exercise offers significant health benefits for people of all ages and both sexes.
• Many organizations, such as the American Heart Association, strongly advocate regular exercise.
• Opportunities are increasing for adults to engage in athletic events such as marathons, long-distance bicycle rides, triathlons, 10K and 5K races, and walks, many of which are charitable fund-raisers.
• Changing laws, regulations, and social attitudes like Title IX are making more exercise possible for more people.
• Support is growing for extensive outdoor infrastructure in urban areas for exercise, including recreational trails and bicycle lanes. [Ed. note: See the author’s article “Outlook for the Automobile’s Alternatives” in the September-October 2008 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

Health and Aging

The popularity of pilates, yoga, and other gentler fitness activities results from a growing recognition that flexibility is one of the three types of essential fitness activities, along with cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength, especially as the U.S. population ages.

I believe that older people — those over age 45 — are already an anchor of the fitness movement. In my study “Global Aging and Sports: The Impact of Aging of the World’s Population on the World of Sports,” I found that, between 1993 and 2005, participation rates among people over age 45 were growing in many sports and fitness categories, even while total participation rates fell in some.

Also, while low-impact sports are certainly highly popular, more and more older people engage in strenuous activities as well. Age group competitions in events like marathons and senior games give people over 45 reason to train for and participate in events that they would not have considered a generation ago.

A countertrend to this aging-fitness movement may be fiscal rather than physical: People over 45 today, especially retirees over age 55, often can devote a lot of leisure time to sports and fitness because they have defined benefit pensions that guarantee income for life. However, defined benefit pensions are disappearing from private-sector retirement plans and are less generous for public-sector workers. Retiree health benefits, especially for those too young for Medicare eligibility, are also fast going away.

Prospects for a Healthier Society

Children’s lack of fitness today is a big issue. If incidence of childhood obesity and diabetes continues to increase, as some dire predictions suggest, then significant numbers of tomorrow’s working-age adults will not be fit and will have limited ability to become fit. Parents will need to change their attitudes and practices to allow their children more time for free outdoor play, to encourage more walking and bicycling to school, to lobby schools and politicians for more and better physical education, and to fight for reform in children’s and youth sports.

For working-age adults, the issue is largely whether they will choose to devote enough of their leisure time to fitness for good health, and, if the long-term decline in smoking is any guide, there is reason for hope that they will gradually do so. Adults past working age also need to choose to devote part of their leisure to active pursuits, as many are already doing. However, without significant medical advances, the triad of old-age diseases — Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and diabetes — coupled with lack of financial resources and increasing caregiving responsibilities may prevent them from doing so to the extent they would like.

So, what if we do get a pill that simulates the effects of exercise? As recent research from the Salk Institute suggests, this possibility is no longer science fiction, though other researchers warn of the loss of other benefits of exercising.

A real test of whether the fitness revolution will culminate in a new pervasive social norm will be whether people continue to choose active leisure pursuits. People of the future may have a choice between taking long brisk walks or taking a pill and sitting on the couch, watching their favorite sitcom. The challenge may be to make moderate exercise at least as much fun as what’s on TV.

About the Author

Kenneth W. Harris, a former policy analyst and manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, is chairman of the Consilience Group LLC and transportation field editor for Techcast.org. Among his reports on sports futures are “Global Aging and Sports” (2006) and “Physical Activity Trends” (2007). Web site www.theconsiliencegroup.com.

Be Your Own Big Brother

Call it Web-based personal fitness, or maybe Vanity 2.0: In January 2009, a Silicon Valley start-up called Fitbit will release a wireless system that allows people to track and monitor intimate physical information about themselves and then upload that info to a publicly viewable Web site. The system consists of a hair-clip sized wearable device, the Fitbit Tracker, which monitors its owner’s steps, exercise levels, calories, and sleep patterns.

“The Tracker uses motion-sensing technology to precisely capture all moment-to-moment physical activity throughout the day and night. It also measures sleep quality to provide a holistic view of a 24-hour period,” according to a statement.

At the click of a button, calories, steps, and distance are illuminated and displayed on the Tracker. “In addition to these numerical measurements, the Tracker also displays a user’s progress toward [his or her] goals in the form of an avatar that changes as a user advances toward or falls behind [his or her] goals,” reads the statement. The biggest difference between the Fitbit and a standard pedometer is that the Fitbit allows people to track their own fitness progress online with friends, family, and co-workers, or even strangers. Users can also input nutrition, weight, and other data onto the Web site to gain a “compelte picture of their health.”

The device itself is little more than a 2.4 GHz radio-frequency identification tag, similar to the tags found on store merchandise to prevent stealing. Instead of sending digital data to a security system in a store, the device simply transmits the data wirelessly to a web of receivers or base stations without the user having to lift an extremely fit finger.

“We know that direct action to upload data to a site can turn into a chore,” says Fitbit chief technical officer Eric Friedman.

A machine that watches its owner may ring of Orwell, but many tech-watchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, forecast that the most interesting computer applications in the years ahead will involve sensors. Industry experts forecast more sensing devices to hit the market in the next decade.

The Fitbit’s makers are also optimistic that people will use the knowledge gleaned from the device to make healthier choices. Says Friedman, “We feel that anything we can do to get people to live healthier helps the world be a better place.” — Patrick Tucker

Source: Fitbit, www.fitbit.com, personal interviews.

Video Games as Behavior Modification

Anyone who’s ever been snapped at by someone having a bad day knows that feelings of insecurity lead people to behave in ways that might be deemed aggressive. Psychologist Mark Baldwin of McGill University says that insecurity, bullying behavior, and so on are emotional reactions that happen “automatically — extremely quickly, and without you wanting them or being able to control them.” He and his students have come up with a surprising answer to help people develop “more positive automatic patterns of thought,” namely video games.

Through what he’s calling the Self-Esteem Initiative, Baldwin and his students have created a series of video games that aim to trick the human brain into forming more positive mental images and encouraging a healthier emotional state. The research hinges on neuroscience and fMRI brain scanning breakthroughs that show the effects of isolation, rejection, and despair on the physical brain.

“Some researchers are beginning to use fMRI to examine the neural correlates of social events,” he says. “One study, for example, found that the pain of social rejection seems to activate the same area of the brain as does physical pain. … Other researchers have developed a laboratory paradigm to measure aggressiveness. The participant is insulted by a confederate of the experimenter, and later is given the chance to blast the confederate with a loud noise, supposedly during a learning task. The question to measure aggressiveness is, How loud and how long would you like to make the noise blast? In our study, we simply asked participants to imagine being in this kind of situation, and to then answer the same question about how noxious a blast of noise they would like to administer to the person who had insulted and rejected them.”

So, if rejection and insecurity stemming from common experiences … being treated rudely in a waiting room, being denied entry into art school, or being called short … can cause a person to blast a loud noise at someone or wage a land war in Europe, what can science do to fix this? Aren’t rejection and insecurity unavoidable aspects of life?

Baldwin acknowledges that no one can avoid bad feelings or social rejection forever, but people can lessen the effects that these experiences have on the brain through systematic self-reprogramming. He calls this “psychological practice” and says that the idea came to him one day while he was playing Tetris.

Tetris famously calls on the player to assemble falling shapes into solid blocks before too many of them stack up. Baldwin is something of an avid player but says he was terrible at first. Before long, the game came to feel automatic, so much so that, even after he put the game down, his mind would see the world in terms of rotating shapes he had to piece together. He started looking at parking spaces differently. He reorganized his closets. He realized that, if a video game could program his brain to be more spatially aware, other people might be able to use video games to meliorate feelings of rejection, isolation, or insecurity.

So far, the Self-Esteem Initiative is offering three games on its Web site: Grow Your Chi!, EyeSpy: The Matrix, and WHAM! Self-Esteem Conditioning. All of them “lead players to practice specific mental operations over and over. These operations are designed to foster positive mental habits to give an automatic sense of security,” Baldwin explains. “Pairing any two experiences together over and over can — as with Pavlov’s dog — create an association between them so that thinking about one tends to activate thoughts about the other.”

For instance, in WHAM! the player clicks on words that appear in different parts of the computer screen. Sometimes the word is the player’s own name. Whenever the player clicks on his or her name, a smiling, accepting face appears for a half a second. “Theoretically, this should create an automatic association between ‚myself’ and ‘acceptance,’ leading to a mental habit whereby thinking of oneself automatically brings to mind images of warm social acceptance,” Baldwin says.

Does it work? Baldwin’s research has found a measurable improvement in self-esteem among subjects who played the game for about five minutes. “We also asked them to imagine a situation in which someone insulted and rejected them, and then to say how much they would want to hurt that person: Those participants who had played the self-acceptance conditioning game were less aggressive, compared to a control condition.” — Patrick Tucker

Source: Mark Baldwin interview. To play the Self-Esteem Initiative games, go to http://selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca/games/index.htm.