Blood sugar level follows perceived time rather than actual time in diabetics

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/29/8168

by ve55 • 5 years ago

194 74 5 years ago

pnas.org

Lhiw• 5 years ago

The brain seems to have control over more of the body than we thought.

Is there potential treatments that could result from this?

I wonder if type one also exhibits this trait?

guywhocodes• 5 years ago

I only read the abstract and it suggests a direction of causation that the experiment does not give.

I'll read this in full when I have time but I would be very surprised if the causation is not completely reverse of what is suggested.

beowulfey• 5 years ago

What are you suggesting the causation is exactly? That blood sugar levels affect our perception of time?

kayodelycaon• 5 years ago

The brain and body are very much connected. Being bipolar, I am keenly aware of this.

Depression is a lot like being severely sick. Even if you manage to keep up exercise and diet, physical health takes a dive.

Mania… everything goes into overdrive. The necessary repair work isn’t being done, even if you get enough sleep.

Eating the wrong food or too much exertion can trigger episodes.

Mental health is very much tied to physical health. And vice-versa.

mjevans• 5 years ago

This seems to indicate that studies should be designed to investigate the effectiveness of diets with respect to expectations and future plans; since the system is complex and literally based on the subject's memories and expectations of future events.

quitit2• 5 years ago

With surgeries on the eye the patient selection criteria extends well beyond the measurable aspects of their vision.

Instead the criteria is highly dependent on the patient's expectations and second to that that their willingness to work with the vision they receive. Notwithstanding physical limitations it's this difference in attitude which results in real world, measurable, improvements in the patient's visual acuity.

Outside of the op space, a similar-ish issue exists with multifocal glasses (and contact lenses) - these technologies work, but how well they work is highly dependent on the patient's expectations.

lettergram• 5 years ago

I’m inclined to believe this is an inaccurate study. I’d really like to see it replicated.

That said, assuming it’s accurate — that’s kind of an amazing physiological response to perceived time. I wonder if other systems can be impacted or what would cause this particular system to be impacted? I could see people’s metabolism changing based on perception(s).

So many questions, but an exciting and interesting area.

staplers• 5 years ago

Stress causes inflammation of the stomach and an increase in stomach acid production. Seems closely related so doesn't surprise me.

quitit2• 5 years ago

I feel like it's one of these studies where there is deep importance not to read more into the conclusion than what it states.

So while expectation of time would be a factor, it wouldn't be the only factor and that alone couldn't break out of the physical constraints of the system.

I think hunger is comparable: one can be hungry over time as a result of the natural changes in their body, or they can become hungry merely by looking at appetising food. I think psychology can play a useful, but complicated role.

banana_giraffe• 5 years ago

Assuming this can be replicated, it'd be interesting to know if knowing the clock is running fast is enough to offset whatever's going on here.

I'd also be curious to know what impact the speed of the clock had on game play, did it impact their ability to play in any measurable way?

jonmc12• 5 years ago

Paper is from 2016. Huberman Labs has a great roundup (Nov '21) of the research on time perception - and several other related series on dopamine. The title of OP was not surprising after listening. https://hubermanlab.com/time-perception-and-entrainment-by-d...

CTDOCodebases• 5 years ago

I thought of this when reading the heading. I remember hearing ages ago that artificial sweeteners can kick someone out of ketosis sometimes and this podcast gave a good explanation of it.

hirundo• 5 years ago

Suggestion works on taste buds too. In the nineties I had a thing for salsa and ate it most days at the office over things I steamed in the microwave. But I ate the mild salsas and couldn't tolerate the hot stuff. Still can't.

So my boss decides to spice it up a bit, and mixes in some hot salsa. I didn't notice. Each day he gradually added more until it was all the hot stuff. I didn't notice. He went out and bought hotter stuff. For some reason the whole office was watching me when I made some quiet comment about the mild salsa being hotter than it used to be. They thought that was pretty funny.

But I really didn't notice. If you can lie to the tongue, why not the liver?

1cvmask• 5 years ago

Your story "proves" all the studies with sommeliers where they duped them into rating white wines (with red food coloring) as fancy red wines. All the sommeliers failed the blind tests. In fact all those studies showed was that the taste of wine stemmed primarily from the perception of the bottle rather than the actual taste.

phonypc3• 5 years ago

Might want to refresh your reading on this. AFAIK this is reference to one (unpublished) study where undergrad wine science students tended to choose from a list of descriptive terms usually associated with red wine to refer to dyed white wine, most of the time.

It's certainly true that suggestion can change ones perception of wine (or any flavor), but I don't think it's clear that it's the primary factor.

darkerside3• 5 years ago

Why should red and white wines taste so distinguishably different anyway? Because one is red colored and one is white? So what? Seems like your contempt here falls prey to the same biases as the sommeliers.

Of course, you're not supposed to be an expert. But still, seems like a hypocritical thing to make fun of someone else for.

LukeShu3• 5 years ago

You build up tolerance to hot stuff pretty quickly (and lose it pretty quickly). And most commonly-available salsas (even labeled "hot") top out at not-actually-very-hot. If your boss was only gradually adding more and more of the hot stuff, I absolutely believe that he could have just built up your tolerance such that you didn't notice; regardless of suggestion.

PaulDavisThe1st• 5 years ago

And most commonly-available salsas (even labeled "hot") tops out at not-actually-very-hot.

Yeah, that's what I always thought. Then I moved to New Mexico, and got my tongue, gums and throat handed to me on a plate.

jjeaff• 5 years ago

But is there a biological mechanism for "building up a tolerance"? Seems possible that building up a tolerance is merely a mental exercise as well. Perhaps in the subconscious part of the brain at least.

pie_flavor• 5 years ago

I despise the trend of having "hot" mean "mild", "very hot" mean "mildly hot", etc. Possibly the most ridiculous is Sabra hummus where the Supremely Spicy flavor is less spicy than the jalapeño flavor. Hats off to Cheetos for having possibly the most mainstream product of all but still managing to put actual heat in their "Exxxtra Flamin' Hot" version.

micromacrofoot• 5 years ago

that sounds like a really messed up thing for you boss to do to you

IncRnd• 5 years ago

A farmer carried a baby bull calf across his field every day. As each day passed, the calf grew a little more and became slightly heavier. Just a little bit more weight each day.

By the time the calf had become a bull, the farmer was so strong he could carry a bull the length of his field while talking on his cell phone.

Or so they say...

lngnmn2• 5 years ago

There is no such thing as time in this context.

It is an abstraction superimposed and assumed by an external observer.

Molecular biology does not have notion of time, only phases of other cyclical processes which is a completely different "mechanical" notion.

DiffEq• 5 years ago

Time…is motion. A clock is just a standard measure of motion, not time itself.

https://www.motionmountain.net/

monkeybutton• 5 years ago

What happens if someone with diabetes takes LSD?

crubier2• 5 years ago

Negative blood sugar levels

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Or imaginary-valued, no longer in R1?

AnthonBerg• 5 years ago

That’s an interesting question. Very.

Serotonin is involved in all of it. The perception of time. As well as insulin secretion and blood glucose control, directly. As well as inflammation, which is a big part of diabetes, as well as in psychedelics – serotonin receptor 5-HT2A activation is immunomodulatory; It reduces inflammation.

dSebastien• 5 years ago

So people with type 2 diabetes should be advised to get bored more often to lower their glucose levels? :p

swayvil• 5 years ago

Suggestion-induced physiological phenomena like this are impressive and noteworthy, for sure.

But consider the effects of suggestion upon the more malleable parts of a person. Your mind and opinion.

Consider the powers of authority, conformity, marketing, indoctrination.

Black is white. Up is down.

monocasa• 5 years ago

I guess I always figured that your 'clock rate' was linearly correlated with your overall metabolism usage up to a point.

brador• 5 years ago

This could just be a simple stress response to the task ending.

yosito• 5 years ago

What if perceived time is actually following blood sugar levels, and not the other way around?

wutbrodo• 5 years ago

The article is worth skimming, or at least the abstract

They didn't rely on the participants' subjective perception of time passing, but manipulated it through means that can't possibly be downstream of the subjects' blood sugar.

Participants’ perception of time was manipulated by having them refer to clocks that were either accurate or altered to run fast or slow

d--b• 5 years ago

Ah they should have asked the different groups to change game at varying intervals. Now they can’t rule out that switching games faster is the cause for more sugar burning.

jablongo2• 5 years ago

This makes sense. To be clear, perceived time is not directly affecting blood glucose, it is affecting speeds of digestive breakdown and/or insulin secretion rates (most type-2s still secrete insulin). Interesting that this study was even run on diabetics at all (as opposed to euglycemic people) - not sure what the utility is there besides them being familiar with continuous glucose monitors.

Talanes• 5 years ago

Participants were instructed to record their BGLs before and after every meal and to complete a daily blood glucose change chart for a week before the experiment.

For one, I imagine getting a group of people with no history of monitoring their blood glucose to accurately track it over a week would be tricky.

jablongo2• 5 years ago

Yea true that’s a bit more hands on. I was thinking that they had used CGMs.

FeepingCreature2• 5 years ago

Important note!

Another potential confounding factor concerns the imbalanced number of times each group switched video games. Participants switched games every 15 min, according to the clocks they were given, so participants in the fast clock group switched more frequently than participants in other groups. One might propose that the increased switching in the fast clock group might have led to greater activity and exertion, causing blood glucose to decline more rapidly. The switching process entailed loading up a different video game on a computer, which is not a particularly demanding task. Even so, we controlled for this, to a degree, by instructing participants to alert the experimenters when it was time to change games, at which point the experimenters performed the actual switching. No actual effort was required of participants to make the change, aside from alerting the experimenter. It seems implausible that the effort required to signal the experimenter at switching times could have played a significant role in the intergroup differences observed.

They did not switch every 15 minutes! They switched every 15 fake minutes, ie. every 7 minutes in the fast group and every 30 minutes in the slow group. The paper waves this away, but I suspect that getting used to a new game takes more energy than they realize.

A way to test this would be by varying the time that the last game is played, in order to measure blood sugar change during beginning or end of a play phase. If this is correct, consumption should be bigger at the start and lesser at the end of each phase, regardless of how long it actually is.

notahacker• 5 years ago

The study suggests the context switching shouldnt have had much effect as the control group (who switched 6 times) had BGL decrease consistent with normal rest (so by extension those who switched only 3 times must have had lower than normal rates of BGL decrease at rest over the real life 90 minutes, which is potentially the most interesting part of the correlation they found)

They also claim no effect on subjective reported stress level (but those who switched more times did report more stress, just not to a statistically significant degree...)

Although the games were reportedly "easy" I do think it'd be interesting to see whether there were any meaningful differences in the approaches to the game and levels of performance of the different cohorts. And if they performed similarly but those on a slower "subjective timescale" received vastly more "reward" indicators like higher scores, "you wins" or proportions of a grid/map ticked off because they played each game for longer, that would also be a confounding factor

Xen0byte• 5 years ago

OP follows Andrew Huberman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IWDAqodDas :)

cromka2• 5 years ago

2023 hottest career path: "Insulin mindfulness coach".

Glench• 5 years ago

It gets much crazier. Here's a study in Nature showing "Glucose metabolism responds to perceived sugar intake more than actual sugar intake":

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72501-w?mc_cid=2b...

hamilyon2• 5 years ago

The idea is a bit too revolutionary to be fully understood by current generation. It breaks hadware/software model of living organisms. The implications might be so huge, no one today can imagine them.

We really need to teach those things in school now, so that our children do not reject them reflexively as voodoo and unscientific.

jrootabega• 5 years ago

I think people like to think of the brain/mind as a black hole/sink of the bodily processes and organs, but it has profound influence over them. Most obviously, there is fight or flight. But it's more subtle than that. The brain can influence inflammation in other parts of the body, which I can't back up right now, since it's just something I read in a science magazine a few years ago. Although here's something related about how the vagus nerve interacts with inflammation and metabolism:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4082307/

Emotionally relevent hormones, the most obvious of which is cortisol, influence all kinds of bodily processes like hunger, metabolism, energy, etc. And one interesting one I can think of in my own life is bladder activity - ever notice how, if you're on a long trip, you can hold in your pee without even thinking about it, but as soon as you get home and head towards the bathroom, it's like your bladder is about to explode? Or how you can still get up and pee even if it doesn't feel like you need to?

And I think many of us have probably had the experience where we got so wrapped up in an interesting and challenging task that we forgot to become hungry, and maybe even missed our opportunity to be hungry until the next day.

stared• 5 years ago

So, it is sugar consumption per turn, rather than per time.

Blood sugar level follows perceived time rather than actual time in diabetics

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