Best and the worst ideas from 2006

New York Times Magazine – 6th Annual Year in Ideas

As we return to our offices and labs after a nice and unusually warm holiday, most of us need more than a couple coffees to jump start the creative process. Get the creative juices going again by looking back at the most interesting ideas from 2006 — some to inspire and some to laugh at before being forgotten. The New York Times has compiled a list of the “peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid.”

Take a look at their list of the most interesting 74 ideas from 2006.

Here’s one to encourage those post-holiday dieters out there who ate way too much chocolate:

Empty-Stomach Intelligence:

Hunger makes the best sauce, goes the maxim. According to researchers at Yale Medical School, it may make quadratic equations and Kant’s categorical imperative go down easier too. The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

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Illustration by Leanne Shapton

A team led by Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, had been analyzing the pathways followed in mouse brains by ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining, when the stomach is empty. To the scientists’ surprise, they found that ghrelin was binding to cells not just in the primitive part of the brain that registers hunger (the hypothalamus) but also in the region that plays a role in learning, memory and spatial analysis (the hippocampus).The researchers then put mice injected with ghrelin and control mice through a maze and other intelligence tests. In each case, the biochemically “hungryâ€? mice — mice infused with ghrelin — performed notably better than those with normal levels of the hormone.

The finding was startling, but, “It makes sense,â€? Horvath says. “When you are hungry, you need to focus your entire system on finding food in the environment.â€?

In fact, some biologists believe that human intelligence itself evolved because it made early hominids more effective hunters, gathers and foragers.

Horvath says we can use the hormonal discoveries to our cognitive advantage. Facing the LSAT, a final exam or a half-day job interview? Go in mildly hungry, not carbo-loaded for endurance, and snack to maintain that edgy state. Such advice, applied on a national scale, might help save our schools. Since overweight kids have suppressed ghrelin levels, Horvath theorizes that perhaps the obesity epidemic has contributed to declining test scores and other educational woes.

There are many more ideas but to get more details, you’ll have to register on the website. At least it’s free.