or Listening to an iPod Is Like Taking Drugsby Rick Weiss
Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Former Washington Post Science ReporterImagine you have qualified for the Olympics and are walking down a Beijing street the day before your event, when a vendor gives you a covert signal to come closer. You approach warily as he opens a flap of his trench coat, revealing something half tucked into an inside pocket.
“Pssst,” he says. “You want to win gold? Guaranteed to help. And perfectly legal.”
“What is it?” you ask, as he shows you a mysterious device, smaller than a credit card and with wires dangling from it.
“Intracranial transducers,’” he says in practiced English, pointing to the ends of the wires. “Stick them in your ears and they focus the brain, increase blood oxygen, prepare muscles for action. Made here in China.”
“So it’s a doping device!” you say with disgust.
“No, no,” the man exclaims in a hoarse whisper, looking around to make sure no one else has heard your incriminating comment. “Like I said, totally legal.”
“So what is it called?” you ask.
He looks askance again, then leans over and whispers in your ear: “‘iPod,’” he says. “We call it ‘iPod.’ It worked for Phelps. It can work for you.”
***
It is now a widely known fact that Michael Phelps, winner of a record-breaking eight gold medals in this year’s Olympics, is an iPod fanatic. In the minutes before diving into the pool, those trademark white wires were almost invariably hanging from his ears. He has confessed at various times to using tunes by Eminem, Young Jeezy, Lil’ Wayne and Jay-Z to motivate him and enhance his concentration.
When broken down to its mechanical elements, an iPod is nothing more, and nothing less, than what my hypothetical Chinese huckster was pitching—a device that transduces electrical energy into acoustical energy, namely music.
You see where I am going with this. And before I go any further, why don’t you get it out of your system? Let me have it. I know what’s coming because soon after I began to wonder about the parallels between iPoding and doping, an Israel-based medical doctor and scientist with whom I have communicated occasionally in the past—Alexei Koudinov, who among other things edits an online scientific publication called The Doping Journal—sent me a
blog in which he raised the same issue. And that blog, I saw, had led to instant and effusive derision by his online readers.
“Who pays this guy to think up things like this?” one respondent wrote, after Koudinov argued the undoubtedly extreme case that Phelps should give up his medals. Others called the idea that music should be classified as a performance enhancer “asinine,” “silliness,” “a crock,” “ridiculous,” and “mean-spirited.”
One clever commentator claimed that “The writer of the article is qualified
to write for that [Doping] Journal: He is a Dope!” Another, less clever, called Koudinov’s posting “a waste of ink.” In fact, as with most online postings, no ink was involved.
But let’s pursue the idea a bit further. When broken down to its mechanical elements, an iPod is nothing more, and nothing less, than what my hypothetical Chinese huckster was pitching—a device that transduces electrical energy into acoustical energy, namely music. And as everyone knows, music can have profound psychological and physiological effects. It can relax a listener. It can anger or enthrall. It can excavate deep emotions and energy.
If that is not specific enough, consider research published in the Journal of Nursing Research in 2003, which showed that hospitalized infants who had music played for them had significantly higher oxygen levels in their blood than other babies . Now consider that the
2008 World Anti-Doping Code of the World Anti-Doping Agency, in Article M1 under the category of “Prohibited Methods,” bans methods of “artificially enhancing the uptake, transport or delivery of oxygen….”
I suppose this raises the interesting legal and philosophical question of what is “artificial.” In the words of one especially cynical blogger: “As just about everyone knows, breathing increases blood oxygenation. Should this also be considered illegal?” I won’t go that far. But even if normal breathing is acceptable, what about the arguably less-natural activities known as deep breathing or stretching or limbering up?
Moreover, music can affect more than mere oxygen levels. Koudinov cites research by Stefan Koelsch of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, who has published research on biological responses to music. According to Koelsch, music can induce biochemical “relaxing effects.” Given all the talk during this year’s Olympics about the risks and downsides of “having the jitters,” which can throw even the best of gymnasts off their balance beams, relaxation is clearly a big potential benefit.
Yet anti-jitter drugs, such as beta blockers, are expressly prohibited in many Olympic sports (including marksmanship, as evidenced last week when the North Korean Olympic shooter Kim Jong Su was stripped of his silver and bronze medals after blood tests came up positive for propranolol, which can slow a heart that is racing from nervousness and, in so doing, reduce anxiety and enhance concentration).
Phelps may even have received a double benefit by yanking out his ear buds in the last minute or two before competing.
Research published in 2005 suggests that intense music followed by a sudden silent pause may be just the ticket for someone poised at the edge of an Olympic pool, since the music itself can boost arousal and the sudden silence that follows can induce, in handy sequence, a wave of relaxation.
“Music, especially in trained subjects, may first concentrate attention during faster rhythms, then induce relaxation during pauses,” that study concluded.
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continue reading full article at the ScienceProgress.org web siteSource: Rick Weiss. Is Michael Phelps A Sonic Doper? (Listening to an iPod Is Like Taking Drugs) Bioethics: Science Progress by AmericanProgress.org Published online 22 August 2008 [FullText] Labels: Rehovot Science, Rehovot Sport
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