Category Archives: Science

Into the body of the protagonist

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Via Futurity, researchers  at Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy are exploring what happens to your brain when you read a novel.

It’s a small study, but intriguing — and reinforces my sense that what we experience internally is, in some respects, indistinguishable from what we experience in the 3D world:

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

Read a book, and the protag becomes your avatar :-)

How stress makes you stupid

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And what to do about it.

From the article — quote from Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal:

[W]e’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.

The hardest thing about life as a human being is that we get trapped inside our own minds.

As Sousa’s research shows, there’s a biological basis for this.

So if you’ve hit a high-stress patch in your life recently, you have to assume — assume — that your capabilities in the area of “executive decision-making” and “goal-directed behaviors” are impaired.

And then, for your own good, you have to do something about it.

It’s the only way out of the trap.

(The worst part being, of course, that people who are in the trap don’t know it . . . and that when you’re under stress is when you most need the very skills that you’ve lost.)

Easy to ridicule . . . yeah. I know.

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white-flowersFor the past several days, I’ve been mulling an op-ed piece that ran in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled If I Don’t See It, It’s Not There.

The piece is written by Steve Salerno, a former Men’s Health editor who wrote a book in 2005 about how the self-help industry is not really all that helpful.

Salerno’s target this time is the “talking heads” who contributed to the DVD version of The Secret, which — in case you spent 2007 dozing in the ol’ armchair — was a blockbuster addition in the robust tradition of “positive thinking” literature we Americans have been devouring en masse since the days of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

Salerno takes The Secret crowd to task for the way they’re reacting to the recession — which, truth to tell, isn’t always very, erm, nuanced. For example, he includes a quote from one Nan Akasha who says she chooses not to believe in the recession. The implication being that one can make unpleasantness go away by squeezing one’s eyes shut or something.

But here’s the thing. As seductive as Salerno’s mockery is, open that same paper’s Tuesday May 5 edition and on page A12 there’s a piece about the latest research on quantum physics. The research confirms what quantum physicists have been theorizing for quite some time: first, that particles can somehow stay connected with one another across space (non-locality); and second, that the act of observation is itself somehow involved in defining a quantum particle’s characteristics.

Some people would dismiss this as pertaining only to sub-atomic phenomena. In the big-particle world of paychecks and golf balls and stubbed toes (they would say) quantum spookiness doesn’t apply.

But what if our minds operate on a quantum level?

What if our thoughts are sensitive to quantum-level energy patterns?

What if thought itself is a quantum-level activity?

jesterEven more radical: what if our minds function in some respects like a lens that causes quantum-level particles to resolve and literally come into being as a prelude to perceiving them en aggregate with our physical senses?

And, furthermore, what if the demarcation between our minds, as individuals, isn’t as well-defined as we might suppose?

Think about it. The electromagnetic waves emitting from my brain don’t stop at the edge of my skull.

Is it possible that your brain might start resonating with mine if we stood near each other, or vice versa?

And if so, might there be on a collective level a kind of mass entrainment involving the synchronization of our individual energy fields, that might in turn exert some sort of effect on what we describe as physical phenomenon?

If so, then maybe recessions and pandemics — as well as prosperity and cures — really are influenced by our minds. Not created — this isn’t cartoon magic — but resolved out of a kind of soupy pool of potential events or phenomenon — then fixed into place because we take collective notice.

Personally, I suspect something like this does occur. But its mechanics are not only too subtle to be discerned by our physical senses, they are also too subtle to be described, let alone manipulated in terms as childish as “if I don’t believe in the recession, it won’t have happened.”

Salerno’s mockery isn’t entirely misplaced. I’m reminded of a funeral I attended not long ago, where the preacher assured us that the deceased was sitting on a cloud, watching us. Yes, he meant that literally. Presumably Salerno would guffaw as loudly at that solemn Christian as he does at Bob Procter and Joe Vitale.

Which is too bad, because he’s missing something important — something that might mark a turning point for mankind. Quantum physics attempts to peer into a dimension where space and time don’t exist in the way our senses would conscribe them — where death isn’t really death, and where life really is a kind of dream . . . it would be a shame to miss it just because, stated simplistically, it sounds too fantastic to be true.

Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli

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Dontcha love the language academics use to title their papers?

Saweeeeeeeet.

lol

The stuff inside this particular one is even better, though — as reported by the NY Times:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

It happens just today I was thinking about symmetry and the human body — how there is apparent symmetry externally, but the internal organs are not symmetrical.

Which got me thinking specifically about the heart. Why is the heart on the left? Always on the left? Why aren’t there mirror people with right-sided hearts? Would a human with a heart exactly in the middle be . . . different? How? A different species? And I wonder what would it feel like, emotionally, to have a heart smack dab in the middle?

Don’t ask me why I was thinking all this btw. I have no idea. Now if I were a sci fi writer . . .

Anyway, I’m not, so back to the Times article — this biased whole tail wagging thing is because our brains (“our” meaning a whole lotta higher critters) aren’t symmetrical either. And of course the brain’s asymmetry casts a shadow visible on our external bodies, if you know where to look:

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

But that’s not all. Get this — one researcher speculates that the asymmetry of the brain evolved because of the asymetry of the internal organs:

The asymmetry [of the brain] may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

My speculation about how a person with a heart in a different spot might feel different doesn’t sound quite so weird now, does it ;-)

(Humor me, please! LOL)

Beware the purple fringe, my son!

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I have just bought a new digital camera. Needed because I wanted something compact to take with me on my trip to London next month.

I debated which brand to go with; after reading a number of praise-filled reviews like this one, I decided on a Canon SD600.

purple fringe

Image quality was the overriding factor, a priority I learned with my last digital camera. The one before it was a Kodak LS443, which I loved. Its replacement, however, burdened me with a couple of irritants. It has a detachable lens cap, instead of a lens cover that opens and closes when you turn the camera on and off. If you forget to remove the cap, it’s catapulted onto the ground when you turn on the camera (by the telescoping of the lens). (The cap has a strap but nothing to attach it to — it’s too short to comfortably reach the hook for the camera’s wrist strap.) Not to mention I’m continually putting it down and then having to remember where I left it.

More damning was the image quality, particularly a color distortion that crops up all too frequently in constrasty images.

Compare that to this, taken with my old LS443:

no purple fringe

When I zoom no this one I can see some very slight fringe where my sister’s teeshirt sleeve is juxtaposed against the lilypads; even at this size you can see a little purplish cast on the shirt itself, but it’s not nearly as pronounced.

I didn’t know this was called purple fringe until I started researching my next camera purchase. Turns out it’s not that uncommon. And while it’s partly due to the properties of light (a messy substance if there ever was one!) “Most of the problems seem to be as a result of individual camera designs.”

So. Here’s a shot out my back door with my old camera this morning:

more purple fringe

I didn’t get a pronounced fringe but you can see the purplish cast. Here’s the same view, with my new Canon:

hardly any purple fringe

Needless to say, I’m thrilled.

Next step: a digital SLR. But that can wait :-)

The body electric

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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.

Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d Candace Pert

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.

Mainstream medicine . . . catching up

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

The news wires are carrying, today, a 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, inoculating 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?

Long live bacteria

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Here’s a tribute [UPDATE: link no longer good, ah, the fickle Interwebs] (by Lynn Margulis and Emily Case, in Orion) to the little critters.

Some of the language of the piece is a bit much — you just can’t use “xenophobia” to characterize anyone’s attitude toward germs. LOL

But if you cut the authors some slack, the piece makes some good points. We do have to stop categorically demonizing bacteria — and touting sterilization as the magic bullet of disease prevention:

Bacteria also sustain us on a very local, intimate scale. They produce necessary vitamins inside our guts. Babies rely on milk, food, and finger-sucking to populate their intestines with bacteria essential for healthy digestion. And microbial communities thrive in the external orifices (mouth, ears, anus, vagina) of mammals, in ways that enhance metabolism, block opportunistic infection, ensure stable digestive patterns, maintain healthy immune systems, and accelerate healing after injury. When these communities are depleted, as might occur from the use of antibacterial soap, mouthwash, or douching, certain potentially pathogenic fungi—like Candida or vaginal yeast disorders—can begin to grow profusely on our dead and dying cells. Self-centered antiseptic paranoia, not the bacteria, is our enemy here.

Yeah, “self-centered.” LOL

Well. If we eschew blaming laypeople for fearing germs, it’s clear that we consumers are not the real culprit. We do the best we can with what scientists and the media tell us.

Laypeople can’t be expected to challenge something as seemingly self-evident as “E coli-tainted food can kill ya.” Particularly when scary stories about poison spinach and undercooked burgers and raw milk are shoved down our throats with grim regularity.

The real culprit is medical research: researchers who’ve spent the last 100+ years playing the whodunnit game that guys like Pasteur got started — and, as a result, haven’t bothered asking broader questions about microbial ecology.

But one of these days, we’re going to wake up and realize that one of our most powerful tools for fighting disease is to colonize our bodies with certain strains of bacteria (and other organisms too, probably). Like what we whole foodies do with yogurt and kefir only taken to a whole new level.

That will be a healthy development ;-)

Dueling faiths

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That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion [Update, link no longer good, sorry]:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

— C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingness,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Hey, we’re evolutionary oddballs!

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The Neanderthals — not Homo Sapiens — may have been the true “apex of the family tree.”

As postulated by Erik Trinkaus, paleontologist and Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s just published a paper on the subject. The link above is to an interview with him that’s posted on the website of the Archaeological Institute of America. Here’s an excerpt:

If you look at the literature in human paleontology over the last five years, there are numerous articles that are trying to explain why Neanderthals are different. They’re trying to analyze features of the Neanderthals that appear different or weird, in some cases to understand them biologically, in some cases simply to document that they’re different. There is virtually nothing in that same literature that tries to document why it is that modern humans are different from the previous 2 million years of human evolution. In other words, the question people are asking is not, “Why did modern humans evolve the anatomy we have?” What people are asking is, “Why do we have this weird group of humans who lived in Europe and the Near East that we call Neanderthals?”

If he’s right, modern man is actually an offshoot that managed to prevail — as, meanwhile, the main trunk of our evolutionary lineage failed.

Bizarre. And yet — not.

(Trinkaus has been assembling evidence to support this idea for three decades btw. Phew.)