My solution for the smoking epidemic

Last week I finished reading one of the most quirky books- The Tipping point by this even quirkier guy Malcolm Gladwell. The book in overall is an interesting read. Malcolm's idiosyncratic opinions on topics like social epidemics and popular trends are worth contemplating. His dissection of various case studies seems distinctive and engrossing (even if it’s not completely scientific but its close!). The book will be a good read for anyone interested in marketing world, human behavior and social psychology in general. 

While near the end of the book (chapter seven), Malcolm talks about teen suicides in Micronesia and smoking issue currently prevalent across all cultures in the world with America as a reference.  It is the latter that intrigued me the most. Malcolm eloquently presents the case of smoking epidemic; he goes through the cause of it, the erroneous solutions to the problem, and what makes smoking addictive among people.

The main reason he argues that people, teenagers more so take up smoking is: to look cool, they try to imitate people who are either their peers who smoke, and are famous or popular among other kids, or someone in their family/society who is sensation seeking, adventurous and risk taker, impulsive, defiant and indifferent to opinion of others- basically a person adolescents usually look up to. The problem arises when one tries to fight this problem of teenage smoking by making adolescents aware of the dangers of smoking, or by trying to convince them that smoking isn’t cool. It has failed terribly in both cases! For example in the case of former, when teenagers were asked to report on the possible decrease in average life span of a smoker compared to someone say a non-smoker, majority of them replied with 9 years which was more than the actual answer which was 6-7 years. It is clear that teenagers knew about the dangers of smoking, what is amusing is that they actually overestimated them! In the case of latter however, the result is the same. Telling teenagers that smoking isn't cool doesn’t help, because they already know that smoking isn’t cool, for them it is the smoker who is cool! (We all know how cool and dashing Johnny Depp looks while smoking or how intellectual Christopher Hitchens looked with a cigarette; more so how we have managed to completely convince ourselves that smoking to create art is a prerequisite).

Another important thing to point out here is that among the majority (75%) of people described their first smoking experience as unpleasant. And only a handful among these went on to try it again. The rest became aversive to smoking. The other 25% however described it as pleasurable. They felt a buzz (a phrase that every smoker is aware of). Most of them went on to become heavy smokers. This difference is truly incredible according to me. Now one might ask that why such a difference was there? Why one type of people felt the buzz and others didn’t? What was going on in the Brain/Body of these two people? The catch here my friend is that the ones who described their experience as unpleasant were the ones who were genetically predisposed to be sensitive to nicotine; simply put, their bodies could not handle nicotine beyond a certain level as it became toxic. And the ones who described a feeling of buzz had a much more tolerance for nicotine. It is very obvious then, the more nicotine one can tolerate, the more one smokes. It is similar to for example alcohol consumption; people who have higher tolerance for alcohol drink much more than people who are sensitive to alcohol ( I belong to the first category and have had a first-hand experience in this, damn!).

The way nicotine works at the cellular level has been extensively studied in the cholinergic neurons in the Brain. Nicotine mimics the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and enters the neuron through these acetylcholine receptors and causes them to release huge amounts of serotonin and norepinephrine, both of which are known to lead to happiness and mood elevation (well, that explains the buzz!). Certain drugs like bupropion which was originally an antidepressant, interestingly came to be helping people quit smoking by making use of this mechanism. By avoiding the reuptake of norepinephrine and serotonin in neurons. Hence there was much more serotonin lying around in the brain so the feeling of happiness and euphoria remained longer. And people had no desire or need to smoke (because they were already high without a cigarette). It has also been reported by some research groups that for heavy smokers it is not actually the nicotine from the cigarette that gives them a buzz but its the anticipation of smoking that starts releasing serotonin their brain even before they took the first puff (classical conditioning at play here). It tells us how vulnerable we all are when it comes to chemicals and the brain. It also helps to explain why people with depression revert to smoking, for in depression the neurons in the brain release less dopamine and serotonin, hence by smoking the subjects are actually treating themselves (well only for a short while) by releasing enough serotonin in the brain which compensates for feeling low. (but could smoking be a solution for treating patients with parkinsons? as they too have less dopamine in their brains. well we leave that for now).

Eureka! It struck me then that there could be two possible solutions to this problem! 1. Why not make tobacco companies increase the amount of nicotine in a cigarette from 1mg nicotine/cigarette to 3-4 mg nicotine / cigarette? so the people who were smoking say 20 cigarettes a day would now be smoking less because they get enough nicotine through fewer cigarettes. However, this is a sort of suppressive measure, one which might lead to people being still smoking but less; it would not solve the epidemic but reduce the number of deaths.

2. The second and a more potent solution is why not give people an anti-nicotine shot. Like the one you get for vaccines during childhood (Obviously you would give this one to teenagers and above). But imagine a shot which -irrespective of the genetic makeup of an individual- would make him highly sensitive to nicotine, reduce their threshold to nicotine. Basically you take bottoms up approach and create a scenario wherein even if a person smokes, they get an unpleasant feeling because of artificially induced nicotine sensitivity. We just have to find a biological mechanism to fine-tune or alter to make this a real, possible, less risky and an applicable solution, which is more than possible with the current biological information and technology humans possess! This technique could also be applied to people who already smoke as well. But most importantly we would be successful in rendering the upcoming generation free of smoking. Now I don’t deny the fact this is indeed is a long term solution and needs a lot of research and careful scrutiny. Moreover, it might not be the best solution available. But, it is definitely better than trying to make smoking uncool by ludicrous advertisements or employing huge taxes on cigarettes, banning them in public since they all seem to be totally ineffective.What all these approaches have failed to recognise is that teenagers will look up to these cool people, they will experiment with smoking, one cannot stop it. Instead what we should make sure is that their experimentation does not have further consequences. I see the solution of anti-nicotine shots as one that truly has huge potential with minimal or no consequences and is worth pursuing further. You can consider it like we are giving full freedom to a person: go on and try smoking and smoke as much as you would want, but the question is would you want to?  

I am not an expert on nicotine or smoking but then again non-experts are the ones who create the most disruption! As an ex-smoker and one who has gone through all of the typical phases of smoking, I can say we might finally have a solution to the smoking epidemic.

Thanks for reading.

And as always stay curious and remember: smoking kills, and if you die you lose a very important part of your life!  --I don’t know who

Brainy Blonde

We live in a world full of norms, conventions and exemplars, Which get deeply embedded in our minds in an almost automatic manner; without us even realising it or making an extra effort to slide it in our ever expanding memory banks. To give you an example; when you first read the topic of this blog something happened in your mind, something amazing, like a flicker of light illuminating a dark room ( by the way i consider every thought that erupts in our minds being a flicker of light, the brighter the light, the more impactful the thought), you had a thought! and your mind instantly realised that this is an oxymoron. How could a Blonde be Brainy?Aren't Blondes supposed to be dumb? isnt that what all Blonde jokes about? Here is where our preconceived notions and stereotypes come in. Lets go a little back in the history, the inception of this relation between a 'blonde' and  dim-wittedness/lack of intelligence dates back to 1775, Where a French courtesan Who was Very Beautiful(as all Blondes are considered to be) but had developed a reputation of being less intelligent or having no or little common sense. what followed was her satirization in a play as a Blonde who never knew what to say or tok unusually long pauses which made her look stupid and dumb. There is another historical association with this theme: within the Roman empire all prostitutes were Blondes or had golden hair. And the ones which were not, went on to dye their hair to look blonde. There is even some radical examples in the Biblical writings, where eve for example was seen as a women with blonde hair tempting Adam. Moreover, there is a huge bias in the Artists who portray Virgin mary, the Mother of Jesus as having dark hair. 
 But even then, how could such a stereotype prevail so long in our societies? the answer comes from the early 1900 novels,cinema and television advertisements where once again blondes were showcased as desirable and beautiful but not the most intelligent. One of these novels was the famous anita Loo's Gentlemen prefer Blondes. The actress that later were portrayed as blondes in these movies included Marilyn Monroe, judy holliday, Goldie hawn etc. again all of them blondes! Not to mention the enormously popular Blonde jokes that have been circulating for so long that they have further perpetuated the idea and the stereotype (some of them are truly hilarious!).
Now we all know these stereotypes arise inside societies and are a result of popular culture, but could there be actual proof that women with Blonde hair are indeed less intelligent than women with lets say dark hair or no hair at all?
Well, the research is pretty fuzzy. First of all intelligence is a highly general characteristic trait and to measure it is like trying to measure depth of an ocean by throwing a stone in it. Nevertheless, in some studies researchers have tried to find out the link between blonde hair and intelligence. In a survey of 120 people(60 men, 60 women) who were shown the same female model once wearing a brown hair wig and once with a blonde hair wig voted on an average the women with blonde wig as less intelligent. 
Another theory that has been floating around for quite a time now has been about how blonde hair color is more prevalent among kids and is thus considered to be sign for youthfulness and a signal for naivety, hence instead of answering the question of intelligence of a person based on their capabilities, our brain substitutes the question and answers a simple one by just looking at the appearance of the person and considering him/her intelligent or not based on their looks (blondes are automatically considered to be less intelligent in this case). There is some bizarre studies also suggesting that men who were exposed to pictures of blonde women performed worse on the intelligence and knowledge based tasks than men who were not shown those pictures. 
What remains to be studies is that: is being blonde a criteria enough for someone to achieve a high enough post at a job (we all know that people at higher posts are not always the most intelligent but still..) for example in a study spanning 500 CEOs across UK showed that only 5 men out of those 500 were having Blonde hair that constitutes to a meagre 1%. Furthermore, in a study where the HR department was given a choice to pick one of two women one of which had blonde hair and the other had dark hair, they were predisposed to choose the women with dark hair for the position even though the two women had similar skills required for the post. Where, thus is a genetic component in all this ?well there is none it seems! And even if one is found, we still do not have enough information in our hands to classify intelligence itself as a genetic trait as there is huge nature v/s nurture debate that is prevalent across this area of research. Hence, biologically the 'dumb blonde' phrase seems not to be valid as far the current research goes. But still the idea prevails in the society and can seem to have serious ramifications when it comes to giving equal opportunity to people. 
Even history has shown time and again that this stereotype has been futile if anything at all. Still there are some movies like legally blonde(2001), which have tried to fight this stereotype but sadly to no avail. They could not change the public's perception.

Finally, the whole point why this thought transpired in my head was because of the fact i saw the trailer of movie Lucy(2014) which stars Scarlett Johansson(ScaJo) as a blonde woman who has been infested with a bag of some magical drugs that can increase the usage of a mind from 10%(average) to 100%. Now the whole concept of using 10% or 20% or for that matter 100% of your brain power is nothing less than a fictitious idea (One that would probably requires a whole book and not a Blog, but thats for sometime else!). Still, here is one more example of a blonde who single handedly takes on the world, and the people who set her up for this, while living the unique experience of seeing the world in different and in a more deeper way than what usually an average human mind sees. Maybe it was a conscious decision by the directors of the movie to cast a blond woman in the role and say 'look here is a blonde who is more intelligent and smart than a whole country put together (a country not of hippies obviously!oops there goes another stereotype)' or maybe it was just chance that they did'nt realise but they were helping destroy a long held stereotype in the society. Any of which way this is immensely fascinating.
I am awaiting for the the movie, are you? And dont forget to ask yourself a question when ScaJo comes with a different coloured hair in the middle of the movie that which one of them seemed more Brainy? 
Thanks for reading!
And as always: Stay Curious!