🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (16 tweets)
I feel like cold weather makes the absence and presence of human touch more pronounced. Like when I’m in a hot, sweltering, sticky place like SG I just want “cold” showers and air-conditioning all the time. But in SF my fingers and toes tingle with cold and I relish every hug
I also realize I never appreciated how rough it must be for homeless people in colder places, physically + psychologically. “Left outside in the cold” is a thing I didn’t *understand*. In SG you can lie on the street at 2am in your underwear and it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable
More specifically I also suspect that SF get hornier after dark because the cold makes you lonelier. Just a vibe. At a very primitive level I feel like we need other people more when it’s cold. Or more... stuff (a fire, a coat, a hot drink, whatever - all often aided by others)
Further find myself thinking about @Trevornoah’s joke about how there are no Carribean conquerors (they’re too busy having a good time), and about stories about British and Russian weather, and now I’m curious to learn about the psycho-social world history of culture vs climate
@visakanv @Trevornoah Just read https://t.co/fjkNO3zrCR which tangentially touches about politics and resource density, which in my head is a subset of culture+climate dynamics. It intersects interestingly with just having finished reading https://t.co/mm6Quww4FB
@visakanv If you can find a copy, channel 4 had a great documentary covering how various groups react to temperature changes at a logistics level, and the way that industry adapts to it. https://t.co/0u8eHQVY5T
@visakanv It focuses a lot on cold weather, there's been some recent research in that area. https://t.co/KeUFzWxKfS
@visakanv My interest on it is thru a curiosity on how growing season fluctuation across cultures (https://t.co/XGngfWfMXf) and famines affect ways that humans change their gut microbe, and further how that impacts inter-generational patterns in brain development.https://t.co/4ZPokrXdhP
@visakanv I recently found out that inuit populations have higher rates of diabetes, likely to a change in how their body processes food. Apparently there is an entire theory around it https://t.co/8LKsyPB96M but little on how it impacts and interacts with their culture.
@visakanv There's also links to microbes that seem to play a role. https://t.co/Qr4FRifuZE
@visakanv There's a lot of commotion going around right now on how mental performance seems to tie to body temperature (particularly due to findings of a gender divide). My own family's body temperature irregularity suggests it is not a human universal.
@visakanv My own cognition seems to improve under states of fever (and afaict s a common finding for autistics/schizophrenics) and I am way better at higher ambient temp. Suggests to me a link between the immune system and temperature regulation may be at play there, but being overlooked.
@visakanv Idea of insulin/gender variation affecting mental performance is not entirely unfounded: https://t.co/3kABqaNhfrMakes me wonder if they've done similar studies of insulin/immune system across cultures.