QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (38 page)

Yes. It’s at least as effective as drugs.

Recent research involving subjects aged twenty-four to forty-five found that half an hour’s exercise three to five times a week has the same (or better) effect on depression than drugs, regularly reducing symptoms by nearly 50 per cent.

According to
Science News
, placebos are more effective at curing depression than either drugs or herbal remedies. In a series of trials carried out between 1979 and 1996, Seattle psychiatrist Dr Arif Khan found that St John’s Wort completely cured 24 per cent of cases, the anti-depressant drug Zoloft cured 25 per cent of cases, but the sugar-pill placebos effected a complete cure in 32 per cent of patients.

In a more recent study comparing the anti-depressants Prozac and Efexor with placebos, the drugs won with a 52 per cent cure rate, but the placebos still scored impressively with 38 per cent. But as soon as the deception was revealed, the patients’ condition worsened rapidly.

Many commentators believe that the context of the treatment – a clinical trial with lots of professional attention being paid to the participants – was an important factor. The conclusion seems to be that a combination of drugs and
personal care produces the quickest and longest-lasting cure.

Meditation also seems to work. In a research project involving Tibetan monks recommended by the Dalai Lama, Richard Davidson, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, asked the monks to meditate on ‘unconditional loving-kindness and compassion’.

The result was an extraordinary pattern of gamma brainwaves, usually very difficult to detect. The implication seems to be that, if trained to do so, the brain can produce its own dopamine – the chemical whose lack causes depression.

Using drugs leads your brain stop producing its own dopamine almost completely.

By training yourself to ‘be positive’ you can make yourself cheerful again. This may also be why placebos work: belief is a powerful thing.

Lithuania, which in 2003 boasted an astonishing forty-two suicides per 100,000 of population. This is over 1,500 people: more than are killed by traffic accidents and twice as many as a decade ago.

To put it in an international context Lithuanian suicides outstrip the British figure by six to one, the USA’s by five to one, and are almost three times the world average. Nobody
knows why, but it is interesting that seven of the top ten suicide nations are Baltic states or other former members of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it’s because Lithuania also has the world’s highest density of neurologists.

Across the world, including the Baltic, the people most likely to commit suicide are men (young and old) living in rural areas. This makes sense: anyone who’s spent time on a struggling farm knows that alcohol, isolation, debt, the weather and the inability to ask for help (known by psychologists as ‘helpless male’ syndrome), combined with proximity to firearms and dangerous chemicals, make a lethal combination.

The exceptions are China and southern India where young women in rural areas are most at risk. The respective rates are 30 and 148 per 100,000. In China this is thought to be because young brides are often left isolated by their new husbands, who immediately leave to work in the city. In India, self-immolation accounts for a third of all suicides by teenage girls.

Suicide, generally, is on the rise – accounting for a million deaths a year, or one every forty seconds. That’s half of all violent deaths: more people now kill themselves than die in wars.

On the other hand, Sweden, for a long time plagued with the ‘so boring, everyone kills themselves’ tag, is no longer even in the top twenty.

The precise historical basis of the ‘Swedish suicide’ myth is lost in the fog of post-war reconstruction, but many Swedes blame Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the USA 1953–61, who used their (at that time) high suicide rate to undermine the cheerful, dangerously anti-capitalist egalitarianism of Swedish social democracy.

Winsome greetings cards and unsolicited emails assure us that it takes many more muscles to frown than to smile – the idea being that you may as well cheer up and be happy, as it takes less effort than being a sourpuss.

Unfortunately, it’s not strictly true. It actually takes one more muscle to smile than to frown. There are fifty-three muscles in the human face, twelve of which are needed for a nice big smile, while only eleven are needed to frown.

A genuine smile is technically known as a Duchenne or zygomatic smile. The French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne (1806–75), who began his career electrocuting fishermen, was the first to prove that a sincerely warm smile uses the muscles of the eyes as well as the mouth, and the word zygomatic comes from the Greek
zygoma
, meaning ‘yoke’, after the two zygomatic muscles that run from each cheekbone to the corner of the mouth.

As well as these four muscles, smiling takes two muscles to crinkle the eyes, two to pull up the corners of the lips, two to pull them sideways and two to curve the angle of the mouth. Total to smile: twelve. On the other hand, a frown needs two muscles to pull down the lips, three to furrow the brow, one to purse the lips, one to depress the lower lip, two to pull the mouth corners down and two eye crinklers. Total to frown: eleven.

Despite all this, on balance it may still be easier to smile – largely because, in all but the most miserable cases, people smile much more often than they frown. As a result, our smiling muscles tend to be stronger.

Incidentally, a cursory, insincere smile only needs two muscles. These are known as the risorius muscles (from the Latin for ‘laughter’) or Santorini’s muscles, after the Italian anatomist Giovanni Santorini (1681–1737) who discovered them, and they are responsible for pulling the corners of the mouth sideways. So, if your object is to fail to spread happiness with the absolute minimum of effort, a fake smile is easily your best bet.

No.

It’s a good story. The twentieth century’s worst dictator, with the blood of tens of millions on his hands, was too fastidious, or sentimental, or cranky to eat meat. It’s regularly trotted out – illogically – as a good argument against vegetarianism. Unfortunately, it’s not true.

Various biographers, including those who knew the dictator intimately, record his passion for Bavarian sausages, game pie and (according to his chef) stuffed pigeon.

He was, however, plagued by chronic flatulence, for which his doctors regularly recommended a vegetarian diet (a remedy which will surprise many vegetarians). He also received regular injections of a high-protein serum derived from pulverised bull’s testicles. That’s a long way from a mushroom timbale or lentil bake.

There is no evidence in his speeches or writings that he was ideologically sympathetic to vegetarianism, and not one of his lieutenants was a veggie. In fact, he was far more likely to have criminalised vegetarians along with Esperanto speakers, conscientious objectors and other detested ‘internationalists’.

Nor was he an atheist. Here he is in full, unambiguous flow in
Mein Kampf
(1925): ‘I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.’ He was to use the same form of words in a Reichstag speech in 1938.

Three years later he told General Gerhart Engel: ‘I am now, as before, a Catholic and will always remain so.’

Far from being a ‘godless’ state, Nazi Germany enthusiastically worked with the Catholic Church. Infantry soldiers each wore a belt with
Gott mit uns
(God is with us) inscribed on the buckle, and blessings of troops and equipment were regular and widespread.

If you still think it’s Germany, you must have been living in a cave.

The usual answer is Britain, because of their use of internment camps for families in the Second Boer War of 1899–1902.

In actuality, the concept is Spanish. In their struggle to retain Cuba in 1895, they first came up with the idea of ‘concentrating’ civilians in one place to make them easier to control. That struggle ended in defeat for Spain, and their troops began to withdraw from the island in 1898. The USA stepped into the vacuum, exerting a military influence on the
island until Castro’s revolution of 1959.

The British translated the Spanish term,
reconcentratión
, when faced with a similar situation in South Africa. The camps had been made necessary by the British policy of burning down Boer farms. This created a large number of refugees. The British decided to round up all the women and children left behind by the Boer troops, to stop them resupplying the enemy.

In total, there were forty-five tented camps for Boer women and children and sixty-four for black African farm labourers and their families.

Despite the humane intentions, conditions in the camps quickly degenerated. There was very little food, and disease spread rapidly. By 1902, 28,000 Boers (including 22,000 children) and 20,000 Africans had died in the camps – twice as many as the soldiers killed in the fighting.

Shortly after this, the Germans also established their first concentration camps in their attempts to colonise South-West Africa (now Namibia).

Men, women and children of the Herero and Namaqua peoples were arrested and imprisoned and forced to work in camps. Between 1904 and 1907, 100,000 Africans – 80 per cent of the Herero and 50 per cent of the Namaqua – died through violence or starvation.

The UN now considers this the first genocide of the twentieth century.