Kirsten Mortensen's blog

I expected something different from Candace Pert’s latest book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d. For starters, the title’s a bit of a bait to the text’s switch. You aren’t going to find that promised Everything here. In fact, you aren’t going to find much, if any self helpy advicey stuff.

What you’re going to find, instead, are two other books. The one that takes up the most room is an autobiographical account of Pert’s efforts to deal with personal “issues” she’s realized have sabotaged her efforts to realize her vision of an AIDS cure. Pert and her husband, Michael Ruff, have pioneered research on peptides that block the receptors that permit the AIDS virus to enter cells (Pert’s a recognized experts in peptides and peptide receptors; as a graduate student in the 1970s, she proved the existence of opiate receptors). The original research they did was funded by the National Institute of Health; the two have been fighting for years, now, to wrest control of it from others who, for various reasons, have either quashed it or tried to leverage it for other, less compelling causes. This content is no doubt of interest to Pert’s fans, and will no doubt be a useful model to people struggling through parallel difficulties, but it’s not what I was looking for when I bought the book.

The other book got me excited. Unfortunately, it’s on the thin side: bits scattered here and there, primarily as summaries of presentations Pert has given over the last couple of years during her many public appearances.

The first bit peeks out at us right away, when Pert tells us she believes in something even more radical than “mind over matter. ” She believes that “mind becomes matter” — and that there is “real science” to support that assertion.

By sorting out the autobiographical diary-of-a-seeker stuff, one is able to find hints of that science. A big piece of it is that James Oschman (with whom Pert has collaborated on another book) has proposed “a physical structure in the body composed primarily of collagenous fibers, the kind that make up your connective tissue.” This structure, which Oschman calls “the matrix,” connects and penetrates every cell of the body, “a new understanding that flies in the face of the classical view of cells as empty little bags whose interior isn’t hooked up to existing structures.”

The significance of this structure, Pert writes, is that it’s “actually a semiconductor, a substance capable of supporting fast-paced, electrical activity . . . [I]n many ways, it’s like a giant liquid crystal.”

Apparently peptides — some of which we recognize as neurotransmitters that affect mood, e.g. serotonin — cause our cells to give off electrical signals which are transmitted by/across this structure. In other words, when we resonate with an emotion, we really are resonating. Furthermore, others around us can be affected by this resonance, rather like a tuning fork, rung, can cause another tuning fork to vibrate. You know the old quandary about how could a flock of birds sitting in a tree suddenly take off at once, as if they were one organism? Well, based on Pert seems to be saying, they are one organism: they are matrices within a greater matrix . As are the crowds of people at a concert or sporting event or political rally or church service.

Our body can also store charges — i.e., past emotional charges can be recorded by or imprinted in our bodies, causing us to essentially “lock in” to certain habitual ways of feeling or responding emotionally.

There are some other bits as well about the frequencies of music, color, and brain waves sharing identical wavelengths. Put it together and there’s the suggestion that, for example, our emotional response to music can be attributed the way the tones stimulate our cells’ neurotransmitter receptors. Wild. Wish there was more of that kind of stuff in the book.

Technorati Tags: peptides, neurotransmitters

I hate to be the one who says “I told you so” but when the pointed commentary fits ;-)

The news wires are carrying, today, this story about research showing a correlation between obesity and gut flora.

They aren’t sure what the relationship means, yet. Specifically, nobody knows if, say, innoculating the gut with certain strains of microbe could promote weight loss.

But at least they’re finally acknowledging that gut microbes play a role in human health. Kind of like what the alt health crowd has been saying for, oh, thirty-odd years now?

Technorati Tags: bacteria, gut health

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was when the Mortensen side of the family got together. My dad’s parents lived right next door, so several times a year my uncle and aunt would turn up with my cousins, and what a blast we’d have. And man, the noise!!! We have the sort of family where everybody loves to talk — and the one who talks with the most enthusiasm holds the floor :-)

So it comes as no surprise that we’re spilling out into the blogosphere. First my dad — now my cousin Hal!

LOL

Technorati Tags: blogs

Article is by Bob Garfield. This gets one piece of it:

It’s said that if you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters, eventually you will get the works of William Shakespeare. When you put together a million humans, a million camcorders, and a million computers, what you get is YouTube.

The subhead gets another:

TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.

Uh huh.

Also worth the click is the glimpse into the post Google-acquisition ride of Chad Hurley, one of the site’s founders. There’s something so kinda sweet & touching about these overnight Internet zillionnaire stories, isn’t there? Another coupla dorm room geeks all grown up and rich. *sniff*

Technorati Tags: youtube

“HarperCollins announced the firing, ‘effective immediately,’ in a two-sentence news release that was issued about 7 p.m. Eastern time.”

Technorati Tags: O.J. Simpson

I started Christmas shopping last week. Within a day the UPS truck was finding my door. Then, this afternoon the floodgates opened: a pile of boxes on my doorstep.

What could be more fun?

I also noticed that instead of just a driver on the truck, there was a second fellow whose job it was to distribute the packages. Kind of like Santa navigates and his right hand man negotiates the chimney.

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen UPS do it that way.

Is it a coincidence that deliveries of my Internet orders seem to be happening faster this year than last? Do you suppose UPS has tweaked its processes so it can better meet holidaytime demand? Do you suppose online retailers are doing the same? Do you suppose the Internet shopping infrastructure is blossoming into a thing of glorious & unprecedented consumerist beauty?

Dunno, but I can tell you I LOVE shopping online. I’ll go out and shop in person for a few things this year. But Internet shopping is heavenly. You can compare prices with the click of a mouse, find neat things without having to schlep around the space time continuum AND you get lots of visits from shipping carriers. What could be more fun?

This is going to be the best Christmas EVER.

:-)

Technorati Tags: Christmas shopping

When someone wrote an Amazon review that she’d bought Outwitting Dogs because her dog was on the cover, I assumed she meant she owned a Jack Russell terrier and bought the book because there’s a Jack Russell on the front.

Doh!!!

It really IS her dog on the cover!!!

Susan has sent me some more pics of Camilla to post here. Look at that sweetie! She doesn’t look at all like a dog who would chew a slipper now, does she!

And isn’t this cool? Turns out the book’s cover model is a hard-working industry professional with a massive portfolio — who hobnobs with some of the most famous dogs in the biz!!! Lassie!!! Beethoven! The Taco Bell chihuahua!!! Air Bud! And that’s Bullseye, the Target Bull Terrier, in the sunglasses, right?

And look at this one — you can see why this dog works a lot. Doesn’t that make your heart just melt?

Technorati Tags: Outwitting Dogs

An office discount supplier sent to me . . .

Twelve pencil sharpeners sharpening????

I ordered one. Paid for one. Some warehouse picker sent a case instead. So now I have these eleven extra electric pencil sharpeners.

I emailed the company and they don’t want them back:

Thank you for letting us know. However, since it was our error and you were not billed anything extra, you may keep the additional pencil sharpeners you received.

Anybody need a pencil sharpener????

Meanwhile my cat inspected the situation and decided she was singularly unimpressed:

Technorati Tags: pencil sharpener, Friday catblogging

Catching up on some things, here: I finished The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant several weeks ago and before I mess with the code to remove its image from my sidebar I may as well blog about it, eh?

I liked the book; I liked the way it pulled me into the 15th century and into the inner life of the narrator. The fact that it raises issues around suspension of disbelief is not any flaw in the novel per se, but in the genre.

One can’t help but wonder whether a 15th century teenager would view the world in a way that could even be communicated to a 21st century observer.

How did women living at that time view themselves? How could they?

In some respects, I think Dunant has probably hit on a few answers. The narrator’s habit of filtering her interpretation of the world in religious terms comes across as plausible, for instance. And certainly her conflict with her parents and siblings rings true, given her personality and intelligence. There is internal consistence, which helps a great deal to make the novel’s pretences work.

But what about the primary themes of the novel? They are essentially feminist: the narrator is precociously bright and desires desperately to be a painter; because she’s a woman, both her intelligence and her artistic ambitions are a liability. This conflict, incidentally, isn’t handled in a way that’s stilted or cloying. Nonetheless, one can’t help but wonder whether any woman at that time could have articulated herself in those terms.

Put another way: could such conflicts have become even close to conscious 500 years ago?

It’s an impossible question to answer; we can’t place ourself inside the skins & minds of long-dead people.

Historical novels are, instead, rather like dreams: they insert a contemporary self into a vastly peculiar landscape and say, “now. React.”

Quite possibly, that’s enough.

Technorati Tags: book review, The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant

Can’t solve a problem on the level at which it were wrought.

So. Anyway. This is kind of cool:

If human speech is recorded and played backwards, mixed amongst the gibberish at regular intervals can be heard very clear statements. These statements usually appear in short sentence form and are nearly always related to the forward speech. It appears constantly throughout language, so much so in fact, that it is believed to be a natural part of our speech processes.

The webpage has audio clips if you want to listen for yourself. Some are pretty amazing, especially the ones that aren’t taken from famous audio recordings (scroll down to the list at the bottom of this page). By which I mean, this isn’t muddled audio inkblot stuff — it really sounds like clearly spoken words.

Either a huge hoax or our subconscious minds are continuously encoding “secret” messages in our speech.

From the FAQ page, the phenomenon was discovered by one David Oates “after his tape deck became damaged and only played tapes backwards” and that we embed these sort of messages every 5-15 seconds as we talk.

Wild.

Technorati Tags: reverse speech