NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

On 8/20/2013 6:38 PM, Justin Dearing wrote:
>
> Can you provide a link to that study? I've never heard that, and my 
> gut says it's folk wisdom that "experts" use to justify their behaviour.
>

Unfortunately not offhand.  I read it on the internet so it must be 
true? :-)

Honestly though, I think I read about it in Pragmatic Thinking and 
Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, by Andy Hunt
http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning

It was a very interesting book with lots of little tidbits.  The most 
fun "new to me" fact was when he was....disparaging the idea of 
cube-farms.  He referenced a wide spread belief that we only have a set 
number of brain cells, they don't grow back.  I recall learning this 
back in school as part of all the anti-drinking classes[ie "alcohol 
kills brain cells and you don't grown any new ones!"]  This bit of 
wisdom is based on a decades old study of rats where it was found that 
they stopped growing new brain cells after adulthood. What had been 
overlooked was the environmental factors: ie these were rats kept in a 
sterile environment, no stimulation, nothing new, every day the same old 
same old[making the obvious analogy to cubicles and their sameness].   
Take those rats and give them changing environments and stimulation and 
low and behold, they do grow new brain cells. 
http://www.livescience.com/505-adult-brain-cells-growing.html

Now, I'm not quite sure I'd buy into comparing working in a cubicle to 
being a rat in a lab, since you DO still have mental stimulation for the 
projects one works on.

Unfortunately my copy is at my brothers, so I can't look it up.