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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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15 Jul 2024
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Why Am I So Tired All the Time?

 

Al Herpin of Trenton, New Jersey, died on January 3, 1947. He was 94. Herpin spent a large chunk of his adult life making a peculiar claim: that he never slept.

It’s unclear whether Herpin had a sleep disorder, or was confused, or was just a weirdo liar, but he made headlines regardless. “The man’s story is sustained by physicians who have examined him,” The New York Times first reported in 1904. This admittedly came at the tail end of the Yellow Journalism era, but let’s for a moment entertain the idea that Herpin never slept. How’d he manage that? And why are the rest of us, even though we (presumably) don’t share Herpin’s purported superpower, so dang tired all the time?

There are two universally dependable subjects of small talk: the weather, and complaining about perpetual exhaustion. In your teenage years, that manifests itself as some iteration of “OH MY GOD I’M SO DEAD” in between classes; in adulthood, it takes the form of the subtle head nod exchanged when you and a co-worker converge at the coffee machine to gorge yourselves on caffeine and talk about…the weather. Everyone, everywhere is officially resigned to perpetual sleepiness. Here’s what we know about why this problem exists, and what you can do about it.

The science of sleep

This part you probably know: To be less tired, you need a consistent amount of sleep. Not necessarily eight hours, but that’s ideal, and it must be uninterrupted, complete with several REM cycles. Otherwise, you’ll accumulate sleep debt, which is like credit card debt, except physically draining instead of financially ruinous.

This part you might not know: The typical sleep schedule for humans in WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) is wildly different than it was throughout the rest of human history, according to David Samson, Ph.D., a sleep anthropologist at the University of Toronto. By default, early primates adhered to a rigid system that involved falling asleep when the sun went down and waking up when the sun rose. Hunter-gatherers figured out how to use fire and thus weren’t as beholden to passing out at dusk, but they often slept in shifts to watch for predators. Only since the mid-19th century have post-industrial humans aligned their sleep around the ol’ nine-to-five day at the office.

“When you want to look at ‘normal’ sleep, you can’t look at us,” Samson says. “In our society, where we have 24/7 access to light and to temperature regulation, we have basically just muted our circadian amplitude.” In other words, we’ve stuffed nature’s blueprints for sleeping in the trash, which could have something to do with why we’re so bad at it.

No one knows for sure, though. “It might be that post-industrial sleep is by far the healthiest way to sleep,” Samson says. And by comparing WEIRD-country data to data collected from studies of the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherer groups, researchers are reasonably sure that on balance, our ancestors indeed got fewer ZZZs than we do; they had more napping opportunities during what Samson estimates to be a roughly 18-hour “work week,” but weren’t keen on long, monophasic blocks of uninterrupted sleep. They also didn’t have comfy mattresses at their disposal.

Samson is sympathetic about the whole Ugh, I’m exhausted thing—to a point, because relatively speaking, we’ve got it pretty good. Mouse lemurs, for instance, sleep 15 hours a day. “Being a mouse lemur would probably make you feel way more tired than you do as a human,” Samson says. “We’re reliant on high-quality sleep, but we’re remarkably resilient to sleep deprivation.”

Get enlightened

To slow down the accumulation of sleep debt, wear blue-wave-light-blocking glasses, which can help promote sleep onset at night, Samson says. Any method of reducing the amount of light around you at night is a smart approach, actually; he even tried an experiment where he walked around his home only by candlelight, which worked pretty well, although he admits it wasn’t so practical.

What about at work? “There’s some evidence that if you want to keep your circadian rhythm nice and tight, actually getting some exposure to your environment—going outside, sitting out there for a half an hour in the sunlight, even if it’s cold out—is good for strengthening your circadian rhythm,” Samson says. Light and temperature are the two biggest factors that affect how tired you are on a day-to-day basis. Keep tabs on them, and you’ve got a fighting chance.

Naps: not just for kindergartners

Around 3 P.M., our body temperature starts to drop, and we get super sleepy. When that happened to our ancestors, they shamelessly curled up and passed out. But in order to achieve MAXIMUM WORKER PRODUCTIVITY, the United States has generally pooh-poohed this tendency, which is a shame. When you start to fade, a nap is always helpful, should you have the luxury of being able to take one; the practice is normal and not a sign of laziness, unless you’re doing it to put off all the errands you have to do on a Sunday afternoon. And even then, you probably deserve it.

Blame your parents

To a certain extent, your drowsiness isn’t totally within your control, because humans encode their preferred sleep schedules in their children. “If you look at things like REM, it’s very heritable,” Samson says. “Things like homeostasis—whenever you’re sleep-deprived, and how strong your drive is to go back to sleep—are 90 percent heritable. Your chronotype, and where you are on the ‘lark versus owl’ continuum? That’s moderately to highly heritable.” Next time you nod off at work, remember that it’s really mom and dad’s fault. Your boss can’t argue with science.

The promise (?) of a less sleepy future

David Prober, Ph.D., a professor of biology and biological engineering at Caltech, is studying zebrafish—these little guys—as part of an effort to improve sleep for humans who suck at it. “Their brains are structurally and anatomically similar to ours but much simpler and smaller, and we can use them to identify genes and neurons that regulate sleep,” he explains.

What Prober has uncovered thus far is that specific neuropeptides in zebrafish brains—and probably our brains—regulate whether it’s time to go to sleep or not. “Activating” the neurons that produce these neuropeptides, he says, made the zebrafish get sleepier. Prober believes in 10–20 years, it’ll be possible to identify which neuropeptides have the same effects on humans. “If we can target pathways that specifically regulate sleep, hopefully we’ll be able to mimic a natural sleep state and get the benefits of sleep without the side effects that you might get from something like Ambien.”

Prober cautions that while sleep disorders might be treatable, a Herpin-like, Limitless-esque goal for everyone is highly unlikely. “It could very well be that sleep is doing many beneficial things,” he says, “and it may not be possible to find one drug that will take care of all those things without us having to spend eight hours asleep. I think that’s pretty far in the future, if ever.”

This unfortunate reality check is one of many things that call Al Herpin’s story into question. “Humans have always had better things to do than sleep,” says Samson—but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. “I bet he was getting microsleeps throughout the day. He’d get deep delta sleep for 15 seconds and then wake up. But you can’t not sleep.” To those who wish otherwise: Keep dreaming.

 

 

Original article here

29 Jun 2024
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Access The Body’s Secret To Repair Mode And Longevity Through Intermittent Fasting

It was about three years ago, as I recall, that a fellow called into my radio/TV program to suggest that a great way to slow aging and normalize weight was an intermittent fasting program called the 5:2 diet.

It involved eating normally five days a week and then eating no more than 500 calories for two days in a row, then back to normal eating for the next five days and so on. Several books have been written about it, as the subject of quite a bit of good science, the most recent reported last week in The Washington Post.

Fasting, it turns out, triggers a series of metabolic changes in the body that extend life and reduce the risks of everything from cancer and diabetes to vulnerability to infection. It does so, in part, by causing the body to inhibit a naturally-occurring enzyme in the human body known as mTOR, or the “mechanistic Target Of Rapamycin.”

This enzyme, mTOR, is, as the authors of a 2013 Nature article noted in the title of their piece, “A Key Modulator of Ageing and Age-Related Disease.”  The authors noted in their abstract that finding drugs to “slow ageing” was inevitable, and:

 

A leading target for such interventions is the nutrient response pathway defined by the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR).”

 

They noted that when the mTOR enzyme was blocked in various animals, including primates like us, it both “extends lifespan” and “confers protection against a growing list of age-related pathologies.”

A new study just published in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open found that 16 weeks of rigorously following the 5:2 diet produced a better result for Type 2 diabetics than even taking the widely-prescribed anti-diabetes drug Metformin.

Our bodies are generally running in one of two modes — build or repair. In build mode, the mTOR pathway (and others) direct us to manufacture fat from extra calories and use nutrients and calories to sustain our normal metabolism.

In the repair mode, which we enter when we fast for more than a day, our body begins to burn that fat to drive metabolism, while also scavenging the body for old cells that are still alive but have ceased, because of age, to do their jobs. They’re essentially zombie cells, using up energy and space but doing nothing more than draining resources from the body.

Through a process called autophagy, such zombie (senescent) cells are broken down, and their raw materials recycled for use by new and functional cells. It’s like a major housecleaning of the body, resulting in greater metabolic efficiency and less of a burden on the body’s systems.

Apparently eating more than 500 calories a day is the threshold that tips the body out of autophagy/repair and into the normal build metabolic mode. In all probability this reflects an evolutionary process with deep roots in the early human experience, when periods of feast and famine were common.

It also probably explains why people who survived the Nazi death camps — and had experienced prolonged starvation during that experience — tend to live around 7.1 years longer than people who never underwent that horrible experience.

Takarudana Mapendembe wrote about this at greater length in his Healthy Body Is Yours Substack newsletter last week, noting extensive scientific reports detailing how it helps with insulin sensitivity, weight loss, greater mental clarity and function, reductions in inflammation, improved immune system function, hormone regulation, better digestion, and reduced heart disease.

When Louise and I were first married, we read Arnold Ehret’s 1910 masterpiece Rational Fasting. We’d already become vegetarians because of both our spiritual practice and our opposition to the Vietnam War, but this added a whole new dimension to our eating lives; we regularly did 2- and 3-day water and juice fasts, and continued the practice well into the years when we were raising our three kids (who all grew up vegetarian).

After that caller told me about the 5:2 diet and how it had transformed his life (and body), we started doing that as well, and have noticed some real benefits.

One of my favorite things about it is that after two days of only 500 calorie meals I’m really hungry, something that most Americans literally never experience. I can’t describe what an utter pleasure it is to dig into a good meal when in a true state of hunger, as opposed to the appetite we normally experience.

I also find that after two days of fasting on less than 500 calories, my mind seems much clearer and sharper. Instead of being tired, as most people I’ve shared this with expected, I feel energized.

Check out the book The Fast Diet by the British scientist who figured out that 500-calorie threshold and how it could be used to produce the same or nearly the same effect on the body and mind as a couple of days of water fasting. It’s brilliant, and even if you don’t struggle with weight or diabetes, this is an important addition to the literature on health.

 

 

Original article here

27 Jun 2024
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Do you find the 21st century overstimulating? Try ‘longstorming’

 

Our experience of time is changing. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the early 21st century has left us ‘whizzing without a direction’. Our world is shaped by the restless, disorienting rhythms of near-term deliverables, social media impression counts, technological obsolescence, shallow electoral cycles, rapid news cycles, frenzied culture wars, sudden stock market shifts, gig economy hustles, and occupational burnout. Though it all seems exhausting and unmanageable, the whizzing isn’t slowing: digital platforms now bombard us, minute by minute, with fragments of information that fail to cohere into meaningful narratives, and algorithms that hijack our neurochemical reward systems.

As the treadmill of post-industrial society speeds up, some of us have become so addicted to the stimulation that we struggle to imagine another way to live: psychological research shows that most people would rather receive electric shocks than sit quietly alone with their own thoughts. In his book The Scent of Time (2017), Han borrows a concept from Marcel Proust – une époche de hâte – to describe our overstimulated moment. The ‘age of haste’ has arrived. And its problems are pervasive.

When time whizzes by, individual moments blur together and we stop contemplating how each fits into broader arcs of history. We forget, Han laments, to engage in slower-moving forms of cognition such as wonder, curiosity and introspection. We forget how to reflect and be still. But what can we really do about the age of haste? For many of us, a slower, more contemplative life often feels unattainable. You may feel trapped by the directionless whizzing of the 21st century – trapped on an accelerating treadmill. Can you forge a new relationship with time?

Perhaps your first impulse is to find ways of escaping the age of haste. This is a mistake. We cannot simply break free by ‘exiting’ the world we inhabit. Confronting time requires moreengagement with the wider world. This world, however, is not the one defined by near-term deliverables and neurochemically disrupting algorithms. It is the one that reveals itself when you glimpse the Milky Way on a cloudless night. It is the world that becomes clear when you gaze upon a mountain.

 

Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces helps us step back, slow down and think in the long term

 

Encountering spectacular natural environments can cause a radical shift in how we think about ourselves and the world. According to the psychologist Dacher Keltner, feelings of awe, especially those inspired by natural scenery, can make us feel more collaborative, less egoistic, more altruistic, and more open to social connection. Over the past two decades, Keltner tested this idea through a series of experiments that examined how a person’s attitudes and behaviours change after experiencing awe-inspiring places or things. He found that natural splendour seems to put us in a headspace that lets us reflect on our short lives as ephemeral organisms dwelling on a fragile planet floating in a vast cosmos. This way of thinking can be transformative, but its power is not a recent discovery. Greco-Roman Stoic philosophers, for instance, encouraged retreats into the countryside to proactively ponder life. Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces seems to help us step back, slow down and, most importantly, think in the long term. I call this style of thinking ‘longstorming’ because encounters with sublime geophysical and ecological environments can invite the mind to brainstorm about our long-term futures and pasts.

Brainstorming is a technique that was developed by the advertising executive Alex F Osborne in the 1950s. This technique, as Osborne explains in his book Applied Imagination (1953), involves generating a stream of new ideas by riffing about bold plans or even proposing outlandish hypotheticals. Osbourne’s goal was to help employees come up with creative proposals for advertising campaigns, but brainstorming has since become a widely used tool for generating new ideas in all types of contexts. Brainstorming also works well – perhaps even better – out in the wilderness, under vast constellations of stars, where the mind is calibrated to contemplate the deeper timescales of our planet and universe.

I believe that purposefully longstorming can help us retool how we relate to time itself. Outdoors, in a headspace better suited to imagining possible scenarios in hypothetical past and future worlds, we can find a way beyond the immediacy of the age of haste.

In this case, a ‘scenario’ is created by weaving together ideas about trends (social, ecological, economic), possible events (the creation of new species, the movement of tectonic plates), and potential detours (such as the unexpected asteroid that collided with Earth 66 million years ago). The scenarios we imagine need not even be scientifically accurate. The simple act of temporally extending the intellect across time is enough to change how we experience the here and now.

 

Towering above the canyon like silent guardians, I saw the tallest living things on Earth: coast redwoods

 

I recently tried longstorming while hiking through Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California. Standing inside the canyon itself, which a tiny stream had carved out over aeons, I thought about the fern species covering the 15-metre-high stone walls beside me. The ancestors of these leafy plants dated back 325 million years. Climbing over the tangled roots of a downed redwood tree, itself several hundred years old, I watched the rays from our 4.6 billion-year-old sun filter through the foliage, casting a soft dappled light. As I walked, I saw a tiny waterfall sprinkling over pads of moss as it fell from the high canyon walls. Towering above the canyon like silent guardians, I saw the tallest living things on Earth: coast redwoods. The ancestors of these trees have been growing in the region for about 20 million years, and their relatives thrived in the Jurassic period, roughly 160 million years ago. The scene felt like a portal to an earlier world – a reminder of the vast chain of life, and of my fleeting moment within it.

As I longstormed, I envisioned other moments from the past. Imagining how the nearby waterway would have looked hundreds of years ago, I pictured the redwood-plank homes built on its banks by the Indigenous Yurok peoples, who were some of the earliest inhabitants in the region. My mind drifted even further back. Tens of millions of years ago, redwood forests grew from Greenland to Alaska, France to the Czech Republic, England to Svalbard. The redwoods bear witness to the depths of time.

As I wandered, the canyon’s sprouting ferns and trickling water proceeded at a slow, deliberate pace. This invited me to ponder Earth’s ongoing dance of creation and erosion, growth and decay. Boundaries between the natural landscapes of the national park and the inner landscapes of my thoughts blurred. I thought about the impermanence of human endeavours, and how soon the digital equipment I had with me – phones, cameras – would become obsolete. I thought about the redwoods absorbing our emissions from the atmosphere, taking in carbon dioxide as they continued to grow. I pondered how climate change could reduce the coastal fog upon which the trees depend, or how reduced snowmelt could someday hinder the redwoods’ access to water. And I thought about my own life, my ancestors, and the intergenerational chains of connection that bind us to Earth and each other.

When I left the redwoods, and stopped longstorming, I found myself in a different frame of mind than when I arrived. I felt more tranquil and open to time. And I’m not the only one. In 1969, Claudia Alta ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson, then the First Lady of the United States, noted a similar experience in a Californian redwood forest. What she describes is a simple form of longstorming:

 

One of my most unforgettable memories of the past years is walking through the redwoods last November – seeing the lovely shafts of light filtering through the trees so far above, feeling the majesty and silence of that forest, and watching a salmon rise in one of those swift streams – all our problems seemed to fall into perspective and I think every one of us walked out more serene and happier.

 

Sublime outdoor spaces, such as a redwood forest, can offer a temporal perspective that is rare in contemporary consumer societies. Longstorming acts on this by creating a contemplative headspace in which the fleetingness of the present and the vastness of deep time mingle in harmony. This underscores the importance of conserving outdoor spaces not just as charismatic ecosystems or natural resources, but also as ideational resources for connecting our minds with the deeper timescales of our planet. For some, contemplating these settings may evoke a sense of planetary connection that makes the restless whizzing of our daily lives less oppressive, less urgent. For some, this may also be confronting, as we realise how insignificant our daily concerns are in the grand timelines of the universe. For others, it may shed light on hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties and desires.

By longstorming, your mind becomes a theatre for viewing possible planetary events across time. This is similar to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s concept of ‘timefulness’. Thinking about geological events on Earth, she writes in her 2018 book, can help us become more ‘mindful that this world contains so many earlier ones, all still with us in some way – in the rocks beneath our feet, in the air we breathe, in every cell of our body.’ Longstorming is also related to the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s concept of Robinsonner, in reference to Robinson Crusoe, from his poem ‘Romance’ (c1869-71). This invented French verb denotes the act of daydreaming by wandering mentally to distant places and times. Such plays of temporal imagination are essential to resisting the pressures of our age of haste.

 

Metals found in smartphones, such as gold and copper, were formed billions of years ago among distant stars

 

Anthropologists and geologists have long advocated that we focus on long-term horizons. In the 1970s, Margaret Mead warned against the modern, Western, hyper-individualistic pathology of being too rigidly rooted in one’s own cultural concept of time – a phenomenon that the anthropologist Robert Textor later termed ‘tempocentrism’. Bjornerud has diagnosed consumer society with ‘chronophobia’: the time denial associated with lives of instant gratification. In my book Deep Time Reckoning (2020), I caution against ‘shallow time discipline’: the way that socioeconomic pressures for short-term gains have created incredibly short-term rhythms in our lives. Tempocentrism, chronophobia and shallow time discipline are all ways of diagnosing our ever-accelerating relationship with the world, which we experience as a hyperactive whizzing that spins us, faster and faster, toward death.

Fortunately, you do not need to visit charismatic ecosystems, like redwood forests, to begin longstorming. Walking down any city street or a country road, you can attune to how the rocks beneath your feet have multimillion- or multibillion-year geological histories. You can attune to how the air you breathe is altered by decades of carbon emissions. You can attune to the evolutionary histories of the chirping birds or even the cells in your body. Contemplating the passage of time is, at some level, available to anyone willing and able to longstorm – to begin wondering about the longer timelines of the universe. When you return to your smartphone afterwards, you might even look differently at the device itself: less attuned to the newsfeeds and pings, and more attuned to the ancient geological histories of the elements and minerals that make it up. After all, many of the metals found in smartphones, such as gold and copper, were formed billions of years ago among distant stars.

That said, certain geophysical features (like mountain vistas or idyllic countryside), certain activities (like hiking or backpacking), and certain mental states (like awe or calm) tend to draw out more enriching temporal experiences than others. This has an unfortunate implication: opportunities to have life-transforming brushes with the deep time of our planet and cosmos are not evenly distributed across society. Not everyone is capable of leisurely neighbourhood walks, let alone treks up to mountaintop vistas. Not everyone has the resources to make such a trip, let alone the time. If we want all of society to resist the age of haste, we first need to reform its entrenched structures of poverty – temporal or otherwise.

In the age of haste, longstorming should be a necessity, not a luxury. Without a deeper attunement to planetary time, the therapies of the 21st century will deliver healing that soothes us only in the moment. The age of haste requires healing of a different kind: longer, slower, planetary.

 

 

 

Original article here

09 Jun 2024
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The Story Of Parasitic Worms In The Web Of Life

 

I remember the German toilets. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why they manufactured them the way they did. From the toilets in the trains to the toilets in the older houses to the toilets in many of the older/cheaper hotels I stayed in in the 1970s and 1980s, the toilets were absolutely weird.

Instead of sitting over a bowl filled with water, into which one would poop, thus instantly dropping the stuff into water where it couldn’t again be smelled, when you sat on a German toilet you sat about 8 to 10 inches above a porcelain platform that was totally dry. At the very rear of the toilet was about a three-inch-diameter water drain.

When you pooped, your excrement would lay flat on the platform. You could smell it throughout the room. You could poke it with a stick or carefully examine it, if you were so inclined, or even scoop it out of the toilet if, for example, your doctor needed to examine it. Or heavens knows what else.

When you pulled the flush lever (or chain attached to the tank high up on the wall), the water would flush in from the front and wash the stuff off the platform, into the little water hole in the back, and down the drain. But until you pulled that lever or chain, there it was for the world to see.

And, over time, I noticed all those toilets vanishing. I lived in Germany for a year in the late 80s, and by then they were mostly gone; now you only find them in the oldest of buildings, and even there usually they’ve been replaced with systems that we’d recognize here.

That was when I learned why the Germans (and many other European countries) had these platform style toilets dating all the way back to Thomas Crapper’s popularization of the flush toilet in the late 1800s.

We All Have Intestinal Worms

It turns out that most mammals — including humans — typically have all sorts of intestinal parasites. The smallest and most helpful are the famous Acidophilus bacteria that help our gut digest food and absorb nutrients, but they’re invisible. The largest and most obnoxious are the various worms, the larger and more obvious ones being the hookworm and the tapeworm.

Up until the mid-20th century, there weren’t many drugs that would kill intestinal parasites in people without pretty severe (and sometimes even fatal) side effects, and food sanitation was such that even if a person did kill off all their intestinal parasites, they’d just get re-infected.

On the other hand, there were a number of well-known ways to hold down the number of parasites, to reduce the intensity and effect of their residence in one’s gut. Mainly these were referred to as purges, mostly harsh laxatives like the herb senna, combined with a sharp bitter (black walnut hull and wormwood were most common) that would cause the worms to let-go from the intestinal wall, and thus be flushed out with everything else as the laxative did its job.

So, the “lay and display” or “continental shelf” toilets actually had a purpose. People would take a look at their poop, and if they saw a visible mass of hookworms, roundworms, etc., or a lot of the rice-like segments indicating a tapeworm infection, they’d do a purge that week, which would hold down the worm population for a few months.

Now that our food supply is clean of these parasites, and we have a pretty good number of antibiotic-class drugs that are also anti-parasitic, worms in the gut are rare, and the need to examine one’s stool has vanished.

But, We May Have Traded One Problem For Another 

The main story of modern, literate, technological culture, regardless of where it is in the world, the color of the people, or the language spoken, is that humans are a species apart.

Every culture has a story about it. We were uniquely created separate from all other animals, as in the Jewish and Christian stories of a creator who made us from the soil. We were brought here from Sirius, the Dog Star, according to the Dogon tribe in Africa. We descended from the sun, we are fallen gods, we sprung full-formed from the bud of a sacred lotus.

In virtually every creation story, humans are not part of nature. We’re separate, apart, unique, different, and not bound by the rules of nature. We wear clean clothes, pride ourselves on clean homes and offices, keep dirt (nature) away from our bodies, out of our food, and away from our homes. Because, of course, we are not part of nature — we’re separate from it.

This mentality is killing us off at levels from the most macro — global climate change that may render our planet uninhabitable — to the micro — our individual bodies. The best estimates from a variety of scientists and scientific bodies is that for somewhere between 20 and 100 years our population load on the planet has been so great that it’s unsustainable, and destroying the biosphere that supports us. But during that same time, odd things have been happening with our individual bodies.

Three generations ago, only one in 10,000 people had inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Crohn’s disease was rare, and multiple sclerosis was virtually unknown to most people. Today 1 in 250 people has IBS, Chron’s Disease is widespread, and most people know somebody who has or is related to somebody who has MS. Ditto for psoriasis. Why? We see similar numbers with asthma, lupus, and a whole host of other autoimmune disorders.

Turns out it may all have to do with parasites: bugs, dirt, and — most amazing — worms.

Could Worms Be The Cure For our IBS, Crohn’s and MS Epidemics? 

Back in the 1990s, gastroenterologist Dr. Joel Weinstock was editing a book on parasitic worms, also known as helminths. As Moises Valasquez-Mahoff documented in The New York Times Magazine in the June 29, 2008 issue, Dr. Weinstock noticed that as humans have become more and more successful at ridding themselves of parasites — particularly intestinal worms — we developed a whole host of conditions that seemed to be associated with inflammation (particularly of the bowel).

Noting, “We’re part of our environment; we’re not separate from it,” he wondered if reintroducing some of the less pathogenic parasites humans evolved coexisting with into people’s guts could resolve some of these conditions.

Using Trichuris suis, a worm endemic to pigs — and commonly infecting, without complications, pig farmers — Dr. Weinstock and others conducted a number of studies over several years, infecting people experiencing a wide variety of diseases with Tricuris.

The results were nothing short of startling. As Velasquez-Manoff reported in the Times Magazine:

 

After ingesting 2500 microscopic T. suis eggs at 3-week intervals for 24 weeks, 23 of 29 Crohn’s patients responded positively. Twenty-one went into complete remission. In the second study, 13 of 30 ulcerative colitis patients improved compared with 4 in a 24- person placebo group. … Trials using T. suis eggs on patients with multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s and hay fever are beginning in the United States, Australia, and Denmark, respectively. In Germany, scientists are planning studies on asthma and food allergies. Other European scientists, meanwhile, plan to replicate many of these experiments with Necator americanus, a human hookworm.”

 

Meanwhile, a British scientist — Dr. David Pritchard of the University of Nottingham — working in Papuea New Guinea in the 1980s, noticed that people there were commonly infected with a bit larger and more commonly considered a gross parasite, the Necator americanus, or common hookworm.

This is a worm that can enter the body through food, but more commonly does through the skin — people often get it from bathing in infected water or walking barefoot on dirt infected with the worm’s larvae. The larvae burrow through the skin, get into the bloodstream, migrate to the lungs where they get coughed up and swallowed. When they hit the small intestine, they turn into full-blown worms that attach themselves to the wall of the small intestine.

It was one of the more common parasites that people had up until the past few generations, with a severe hookworm infection causing anemia and even death.

Hookworms’ Unique Ability To Modulate The Human Immune System

But, Dr. Pritchard noticed, the people infected with it had virtually none of the autoimmune diseases like asthma and hay fever that had come to plague England since that nation went on a sanitation binge after World War II. Apparently, the worms produced a substance that modulated the human immune system, toning it down enough to keep our bodies from attacking the worms, but in the process also keeping our bodies from attacking our own cells and organs (the definition of an auto-immune disease).

So, as Elizabeth Svoboda documented in the July 1, 2008, New York Times:

 

In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,’ he said. ‘My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.’”

 

After infecting himself to demonstrate the relative safety of the parasites, he got a grant from the British health service to do a double-blind placebo-controlled trial on allergy-suffering volunteers who were either given capsules containing worms or containing sugar. The results were startling. As Svoboda wrote in the Times:

 

Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a Yahoo group on ‘helminthic therapy’ sprung up.

‘Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,’ Dr. Pritchard said.”

 

Svoboda notes that, as the result of the publicity surrounding Pritchard’s successful 2006 clinical trials, there are even clinics springing up in third-world countries to cater to Americans and Europeans who want to get cured of their asthma, hay fever, psoriasis, or other autoimmune diseases by being infected with hookworms.

The fact is that we are not a species apart from all others on planet Earth. There’s ten times as much bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic DNA in your body as there is DNA from your own cells. We evolved on this planet along with every other form of life, and are designed to be a seamless part of the whole, a thread in the delicate web of life.

When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.

 

 

Original article here

04 Jun 2024
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Easing the Toll of Long-Distance Grief

 

When Amrita Chavan boarded her plane in Mumbai, India, grief was the last thing on her mind. This was a new beginning. She was 19, bound for Canada, the first of her family to go abroad to pursue higher education. The goodbye was heartbreaking, she recalls; all of her relatives came to the airport for the send-off. But at the time, it was difficult for Chavan and her family to fully grasp the sacrifice she was making. “We had no idea what it meant to leave home,” she says.

Then, inevitably, grief came knocking. Almost 12 years after Chavan’s departure, while she was sitting in her apartment in Winnipeg in early 2020, Chavan’s stomach dropped as her mom called with the news. Chavan’s grandmother, who lived in Sydney, Australia, had fallen sick, and over the course of a few weeks, had passed away. There was no way she could go to mourn in person for her grandmother, one of the most important people in her life. Flights to Australia were expensive, and she couldn’t afford to apply for the visa she would need to even get into the country. So instead, Chavan emotionally shut down. “I felt very frozen for a very long time,” she says.

Migrant researchers and psychologists call what Chavan was experiencing transnational grief, or transnational bereavement. It refers to the unique experience of losing someone you love while in another country. Although grief is already a difficult process, immigrants who experience transnational grief often go through additional layers of guilt, denial, and suffering since they are unable to attend the typical rituals associated with loss.

 

I did not feel like I had permission to grieve, because I had not been there.”

 

The inability to see their loved one in person makes it difficult to achieve closure, and the bereaved may be unable to process the loss and move forward. In recent years, this reality has become more apparent, as COVID-19 claimed millions of lives while simultaneously forcing border restrictions. The pandemic further highlighted the critical role of community support and immigration policy shifts to help those who grieve from afar.

The Toll of Long-Distance Loss

Experiencing grief from a distance has long been the reality of immigrants. Anyone who leaves their family behind also risks being apart from their loved ones during times of loss—and often this grief comes with a whirlwind of complicated emotions.

“There is a strong sense of guilt. There is a strong sense of regret that they weren’t able to be with their loved one as the loved one died,” says Zohreh Bayatrizi, a grief researcher at the University of Alberta. She recalls a conversation she had when she interviewed an Iranian-Canadian immigrant who had lost their brother during the lockdowns in the COVID pandemic. Because they were unable to travel back home, or even see his body before it was buried, they refused to accept that their brother’s death was real.

Chavan recalls similar experiences, being separated by borders. “I did not feel like I had permission to grieve, because I had not been there,” she says.

Without this space to mourn, grief can become difficult to move past—especially for immigrants who are undocumented. Kristina Fullerton Rico, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Center of Racial Justice, works with these communities, and continuously hears about how grief affects everyday lives. “People described these experiences of grief and long-distance mourning as one of the most difficult parts of being undocumented in the United States,” she says.

For instance, while studying this phenomenon between 2017 and 2023, Fullerton Rico met a woman whom she calls Florencia (a pseudonym used to protect her privacy) who said, “When you experience grief [as an immigrant], your only option is to accept that you can’t do anything.” Fullerton Rico also shares a conversation she had with a man she calls Felipe: “Felipe told me grief changes you deeply.” The depth of that grief is exacerbated by distance when you can’t get closure from saying goodbye or attending a funeral, he told her. “It’s a chapter with no ending, and it remains unfinished.”

To make matters worse, the weight of transnational grief often remains a burden borne alone. “It isn’t something that people usually talk about,” Fullerton Rico says.

Bridging the Distance

Social rituals, in any culture, are an important part of the grieving process. Wakes and other celebrations of life can help people actively engage with memories of an individual, says Zoe Donaldson, a neuroscientist who studies grief at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Thinking of these memories allows your brain to sort of remodel and think about how these memories now fit into your life,” she says. But for those who don’t witness deaths or funerals in person, this process may be disrupted or made more difficult.

 

They had to sneak away to the bathroom, or hide in a walk-in refrigerator to get glimpses of one of the most significant rituals in somebody’s life.”

 

Gabriela Encina, a psychologist who works with expats, helps clients construct their own rituals so that they can celebrate their relationship with their loved one. She walks them through the process of grieving from afar, through actions like letter-writing, eating a loved one’s favorite meal, or participating in a favorite shared activity. The process takes time. Several sessions of goodbyes and rituals are often necessary for someone to make peace with a sudden death, says Encina.

Similarly, during the pandemic, Chavan found her own turning point for bereavement in creative nonfiction. She had lost her job at the time and decided to attend a writing class, taking on a project that allowed her to dive into her experiences with transnational grief. Through the process of writing, Chavan slowly broke the ice that had encased her for eight months. She sobbed as she remembered all the details about her grandmother: the spirited debates they would get into, how she commanded a room despite her small size, how she brought the family together with her love.

“It was awful. It was devastating. It felt like losing her all over again,” Chavan says.

But it was this act of writing and remembrance that allowed her to reconnect to her memories—and start to heal.

Systemic Solutions

Ultimately, making space for transnational grief requires the restructuring of how we think about immigration and loss. Currently, it takes years for an undocumented immigrant to become a legal, permanent resident in the U.S., and the few who are able to adjust their immigration status typically receive work authorization before the ability to travel back home, Fullerton Rico says. And so the opportunity of visiting loved ones becomes a waiting game, even as family members age or pass away.

“If we pass laws that prioritize a fast path to citizenship, we could avoid having people go through these experiences,” Fullerton Rico says.

Many undocumented immigrants also have inflexible, low-wage jobs, which pressures them to make painful decisions, like watching their loved ones’ funeral on a smartphone in between helping customers or preparing meals at a restaurant. “Instead of being there in person, they had to sneak away to the bathroom, or hide in a walk-in refrigerator to get glimpses of one of the most significant rituals in somebody’s life,” Fullerton Rico says.

Giving time and space for a person to grieve in the form of paid bereavement leave can help. This allows grievers to take time off work without facing the potential consequences of losing a paycheck or their job. Chavan recalls the pressure to continue to work in the midst of her grief because she didn’t have the financial flexibility to lose out on paid hourly work, which gradually degraded her mental health. Currently, only five states in the U.S. mandate employers to give bereavement leave, Fullerton Rico says, only two of which require the leave to be paid.

Most importantly, it’s crucial to “let people know that they’re not alone in this pain,” Fullerton Rico says. She urges more immigrant-serving organizations to recognize this reality and help immigrants get access to counseling, other mental health resources, or religious rituals so they’re less at risk of conditions like clinical depression. She shares the example of a Catholic priest she interviewed in New York City, who has helped perform memorial Masses for transnational mourners since the 1990s. Today, these funeral ceremonies are held and streamed through Facebook Live, YouTube, or Zoom, helping families feel some sense of togetherness.

Experts agree that forming this social support is a key factor in the grieving process. “Grief is something of a social experience,” Bayatrizi says. “It’s an emotional experience that’s shaped through our social interactions.”

Chavan says that the only reason she finally felt ready to face the emotions was because her partner and her in-laws were supportive, giving her a small but strong community in an isolating time. After writing about the experience, she also started having more conversations with family and friends who had read the article, about the struggle of grieving from afar and how they coped.

“It meant that I had this community, this global community that I could reach out to essentially,” she says. “Learning that you are not alone in something that you have gone through can be very powerful.”

 

 

Original article here

 

31 May 2024
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Once Upon A Place In Today’s Mythic Stories

 

Two ideas feature at the core of all quest stories: these are the Abyss and the World Journey.

The Abyss is one of humanity’s oldest and most tenacious ideas that has been used for millennia to describe a place that is deep, inaccessible, extremely dangerous, and somehow at the core of understanding. In some ancient texts, it is synonymous with the deep ocean and is often portrayed as the sea in films today. But its broader meaning encompasses all the dark, deep places we go when we embark on an adventure to find answers. It’s where the obstacles lie and the challenges are found, often in the form of a beast or monster that must be overcome. The Abyss shapes the idea of what a challenge means.

The World Journey is a much newer term, adapted from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. You may be familiar with the storyline, or plot, of the Hero’s Journey, as it was coined by the Sarah Lawrence College professor of literature in the twentieth century. In it, the hero goes through a sequence of experiences designed to help them face and overcome the many challenges of life, often in the context of a quest or adventure. Campbell presented a structure for this process, and it has become a reliable plot outline for the stages of character development in modern film and stories, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or George Lucas’s Star Wars. Campbell’s process leads toward self-actualization with deliberate stages that create a plot which leads a man (or sometimes a woman) through each step in specific order to experience certain hardships and, ultimately, achieve epiphany or personal growth.

The Abyss and the World Journey — where the heroes go and what they experience — embody the very nature of human change, though many stories can be overlooked as simple child’s play, especially in fairy tales. Heroic knights fighting dragons or a girl carrying a basket to her grandmother? Many could dismiss these as bedtime tales. But while these stories may seem soft, they likely began as images directed squarely at those about to experience a profound life change, such as puberty. These tales and their enchanting symbols have influenced not only our idea of what a hero’s adventure should be, but also of what success looks like and how personal achievement is earned.

Originally etched into stone slabs and scribbled on papyrus, many of these stories and children’s fairy tales have become Disney blockbusters, printed best-sellers, and on-screen hits. The symbol of the Abyss perennially renews itself, showing up at movie theaters every month with its deep-rooted ideas of descent and resurrection, and films inspired by the World Journey, such as Jurassic Park and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? are enjoyed by people of all ages.

Why do they endure? Why are World Journey stories some of the most popular stories shared again and again in cultures around the world? Because we can relate to a situation where a person falls (or is pushed) into a terrifying cave and must survive. We understand what it means to find oneself in a frightening “wilderness” with no support, no skills, no training, no hand to hold. We’ve been there ourselves through adversities such as the loss of a loved one, by being orphaned, being the new kid at school, or failing in a business or relationship. Or as simply as missing a chance, forgetting an idea, or failing to live up to our own (or others’) expectations.

Today’s audiences love the same images that captivated people hundreds of years ago: water, darkness, dragons, beasts, labyrinths, forests, and caverns. These symbols endure because they don’t speak about money or politics. They don’t appeal to our wallets or even, in a direct sense, to our minds. Instead, they speak to our innermost fears and desires, to the obstacles we all face and the meaningful purpose we feel when we overcome them.

The story of a person who falls into the Abyss and is never seen again is not an inspiring story. It teaches nothing except to watch where you walk. But the story of a woman who braves the face of a lion to pluck its whisker, or of a desperate man who crosses the deep water in a small boat from the shore thousands of miles from his home, or of a scientist who plumbs the ocean’s depths in search of meaning and returns home as a much stronger person — that is an intriguing story and one that implies self-fulfillment and maturity.

In other words, Newton’s gravitational notion of “what goes up must come down” is not nearly as old or as relevant as “what goes down must come up.” Such a story inspires and motivates, and it even implies heroism, which is what most of these stories are mistaken for on the surface (and how Campbell named them). But the reason these stories have survived centuries, and in some cases millennia, is not because they celebrate heroism but because they teach that these traits of survival and fulfillment are attainable by everyone, even the most mortal of us. Even the silliest, poorest, most confused, and frightened of us can make changes in our lives to experience not only enlightenment but epiphany. Recognizing this when we have screens in every room, distractions at every turn, and challenges in every aspect of our lives is essential; the quest is not only for the hero, but it is for each of us.

The Value Of A Challenge

The ideas of adversity, hardship, and conflict are not concepts we are naturally drawn to. Parents and caregivers generally try to shield their children from hardship in an attempt to safeguard them from the hurtful obstacles of life and keep them safe. But the process of maturing means facing difficulties head-on rather than avoiding them. While it includes terrible adversity, the purpose of the World Journey is not to scare or punish us, but rather to support our growth, and to do that we must look in the face of that which frightens us the most.

Unfortunately, many of today’s stories of princesses and dragons are sugary and fluffy, diluted shades of what used to be quite powerful symbols. Modern adaptations of fairy tales would have us believe that success is easy  — that if we only wish upon a star or wrinkle our noses our dreams will come true. The original versions, however, showed that change is far more difficult. Original fairy tales guide us down a darker path with frightening beasts and scary forests that no seeker truly wants to walk into.

And I would argue that while those original stories, especially those collected and recorded hundreds of years ago by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, were indeed dark, frightening, and often overtly violent or callous, they should not be sugared over simply because they are scary, depressing, or harsh. They served a much needed purpose by symbolically painting a reality that most people experienced and still do experience in their lives: namely, challenging situations that push us to our limits and are, in fact, our very best opportunities for change and growth. Those storytellers and parents long ago knew that persistence allows us to become strong and resilient adults. That facing our fears can make us compassionate, forgiving, and joyful. That making difficult decisions instills in us a feeling of accomplishment and maturity. And, that experiences of confusion and uncertainty can open our minds to new ideas and creative expression that allow us as individuals, and as societies, to flourish.

World Journey stories teach us to overcome adversity, but more importantly, they teach us how to experience adversity in the first place. Successful myths, religious texts, and fairy tales — and modern screenplay and film — do not skirt the issue of hardship and conflict, nor do they encourage us to finish the hard work as quickly as possible. The characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter do not face obstacles and beasts simply to advance the plot, but to develop the inner courage and tenacity needed to grow as individuals within society. Mythic stories put us squarely in the middle of the hardest tasks we can imagine, and they force us to work hard, to guess, to take leaps of faith, and to test ourselves to the limit.

They also teach us that it’s worth it to “dive deep” and to experience a change so drastic that it is profound. In fact, though they seem superficial now in the age of animated princesses, the early stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White are popular precisely because they show these challenges, as do the Bible story of Jonah and the Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, which is perhaps the oldest story we’ve ever found. Written more than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh was an amazingly influential and well-loved character whose journey taught scores of generations of children the meaning of perseverance, curiosity, and spiritual growth. His tale depicts a hero in terribly dire circumstances who does not shrug off hardship but instead plows right through it, diving deep (literally and symbolically) to work through his fear of death. Only after completing difficult tasks and overcoming obstacles does he mature as a person. Of course, he fails to find immortality, but that’s the point.

It’s important to recognize that exploring and understanding these concepts is not only for the experts. In fact, it’s for every person to engage in these questions and to open their minds to the possibilities that exist within human nature and within the self, to explore stories and symbols and push into growth. Curiosity is what drives human transformation, and I invite us all to be curious. To be open and willing to see the metaphor in these stories as chances for personal growth is an opportunity for taking the symbols of storycraft and digging deeper into reflections of self-growth, core purpose, and even epiphany.

 

 

 

Original article here

24 May 2024
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“It’s like therapy”: how washing your hair can lift your mood – and change your life

 

Anya Hindmarch launched her first company as a teenager. At 53, she is an award-winning fashion designer with five children, a successful business and a CBE. One of those types. Which is why it is cheering that the secret of her success isn’t doing rocket yoga at 5am or leaving parties after 10 minutes or intermittent fasting at a standing desk, or any of that boilerplate alpha guff. Her most precious life advice – and the title of her new book – is If in Doubt, Wash Your Hair.

A good scrub with shampoo, she says, “makes me calmer and more confident and therefore better able to cope. That moment of me standing under the shower, eyes closed, not looking at my phone, is when I have some of my best ideas. It’s a bit meditative, for me – a fresh start, a new day.”

The life-changing magic of washing your hair is having a moment. While salons were closed over lockdown, lots of us dialed up our at-home hair care in an attempt to look presentable while overdue for a cut and colour. Sales of Olaplex, an intensive conditioner that has diversified from a salon treatment to rinse-at-home use, doubled in 2020, while specialist purple shampoos for bringing luminosity to silver hair multiplied, as women embraced their newly exposed greys, and learned how to look after them.

Jamila Lee-Smikle, a 27-year-old fashion publicist from London, launched an Instagram account, @girlfreethefro, to share what she was learning about caring for her afro hair at home, debating the merits of rose water and hair butters, and cautioning about removing rings so that they don’t snag on hair as you wash. “Before lockdown I usually went to the salon, but I’ve learned to really enjoy the process,” she says. “Now I wash my hair every Sunday morning. I make a tea, put some music on, and really take my time. Then I style my hair and I feel ready for the week ahead. It’s like therapy.”

George Northwood, stylist to Alexa Chung and the Duchess of Sussex, launched a range of home hair care products, Undone, this year. “The ‘skinification’ of hair care has really changed how people think about shampoo and conditioner,” he says. “We named one of our products Moisturising Cream because the language of skincare is starting to filter through to hair care.” In his reopened salon, clients are savouring being shampooed instead of doing it themselves, and how that brings the cared-for feeling of an experience connected with childhood. A friend of mine left her first post-lockdown appointment almost overwhelmed by the bliss of a professional wash and scalp massage. Hug-starved after spending lockdown alone, 10 minutes at the sink “was the perfect re-entry level of human intimacy,” she says. “I’m not sure I’m ready for hugs, even though I miss them. Having my hair washed was sensual, but also practical, so I didn’t have to feel weird about it.”

Hindmarch is not the first writer to wax lyrical about shampoo as therapy. I first discovered this life philosophy in the oeuvre of that national treasure of sunlounger fiction, Jilly Cooper. When a Cooper heroine is having a bad day – perhaps her lover is a double-crossing bastard, or the roof of the conservatory is falling in – she doesn’t crawl back to bed. She washes her hair, knocks back a stiff drink and cracks on. The scent of freshly washed hair is always a harbinger of good news in Cooper’s world. And she was on to something, because how you shampoo your hair might matter more than how you style it. “The mistake most people are making is using products that are too rich, and letting them build up,” says Northwood. “Healthy hair starts with getting it properly clean.” A professional will always wash your hair twice, because the first shampoo loosens the dirt, while the rinse-and-repeat gets it really clean.

Long before I ever heard the phrase “self-care”, I knew that washing my hair was the best way to turn a day around. Bubble baths make me hot and bored. Dry body brushing, jade-roller facials, foot exfoliation: all of those sound like chores to me. But washing my hair is a reset button for the day. It is cathartic, like having a good cry. (When needs must, you can do both at the same time, and not end up puffy-faced.) There is the olfactory rush of lemon or grapefruit or rose, the purifying sluice of water rinsing a bad day down the plughole, the satisfying chemistry-lab alchemy of bubbles and lather. Should you still need convincing that a hairwash can be spine-tingling, the scene in Out of Africa where Robert Redford gives Meryl Streep an alfresco shampoo is guaranteed to convert you.

One of the chapters in Hindmarch’s book is called Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First. “A lot of women my age work as hard as our dads did, while at the same time feeling like we should be doing all the things our mums did. We end up doing so much for everyone else that we don’t have the time or energy to look after ourselves, and that’s when things start to fall apart.” Taking the time to wash your hair before a big day rather than picking up other people’s crusty cereal bowls is one way of putting your own oxygen mask on first. It is about recognising that taking care of the person who takes responsibility for everyone else is essential, not an indulgence. “This has felt especially necessary recently,” says Hindmarch, “when it has felt to me that women have borne the brunt of a lot of the last year, often taking on the home schooling, even if both parents were working.”

Hindmarch is celebrating her book launch with a popup wash-and-blow-dry bar. “I saw a photo of a woman sitting under one of those old-fashioned salon dryers, with the sun on her face, drinking a cup of coffee. And I thought – after the year we’ve had, that’s where I want to be.” Before too long, touch wood, parties might happen again. But still, I might stay in and wash my hair.

 

 

 

Original article here

13 May 2024
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What Dinner Will Look Like in the Next 100 Years, According to Scientists (and Sci-Fi Authors)

 

Dr. Morgaine Gaye sweeps a hand over her blonde faux-hawk and smiles at me through oversize purple-tinted glasses. If she doesn’t look the part of a self-proclaimed “food futurologist,” I don’t know who does. The future, she tells me in her rapid-fire British accent, is all about Air Protein, a product that uses high-tech fermentation to turn carbon dioxide into chicken or whatever you want, really. Tens of millions of dollars are being invested into alternative proteins and air just might be one of the keys to feeding the world’s 9.8 billion people by 2050.

That’s nearly 2 billion more people than we (fail to) feed today, and an overwhelming amount of that growth, the UN predicts, will be in sub-Saharan Africa, where desert conditions make farming a challenge. Then there’s that pesky issue of climate change. If the planet warms 2.7 degrees by 2040, as experts project, the implications could be devastating. Ongoing droughts, flooding, extreme weather, it’s all on the table. What may not be on the table: California avocados, predicted to go all but extinct by 2050.

The good news is that the food industry is already planning for those pressures, as Amanda Little investigates in her revelatory book The Fate of Food. “I don’t know that there’s a future in which we’re all looking at a plate of wafers injected with specialized nutrients,” she says. “That just sounds like a culinary hell nobody wants to inhabit.” It’s the seeds, farming practices, technology, water, distribution, and behind-the-scenes innovations that are going to change the contents of our plates. She’s rooting for the avocados (though they might have to be grown indoors…and cost $20 a pop).

To take a look at what the future of food might look like, we talked to experts to come up with menu predictions for the future. For the years 2023 and 2024, scientists offered their insights on how food might change. But for 100 years from now—the year 2122—we spoke with people who were unafraid to make some bold claims: science fiction writers. See it all below.

2032: 10 Years

Within the next decade, grocery stores will stock cell-cultured proteins. Stem cells are collected, put into bioreactors, and fed nutrients like glucose so that they grow into animal-free chicken, beef, pork, and even duck (as opposed to the meat alternatives we have today, which are very good imitations made with plant products). These proteins don’t need room to graze and expel methane, don’t waste uneaten parts of an animal, and are less likely to contain bacteria like salmonella. This is the beyond-Beyond burger.

The Menu

  • Upside Foods’ cell-cultured hamburger, concocted in a lab in Berkeley, CA.
  • Animal-free American cheese made with protein powder brand Perfect Day’s patented cow-free whey protein.
  • Bun baked with Kernza wheat, a hearty grain with long roots that retain water and rejuvenate the soil.
  • Good old-fashioned pickles aren’t going anywhere—don’t panic.
  • Hummus made with genetically edited chickpeas that can withstand extreme heat and drought.
  • Food-waste-eliminating upcycled barley croutons fortified with algae powder (it’s nutrient-dense and a great binder, plus algae draws out more CO2 in the air than trees do).
  • Side salad with romaine lettuce from an indoor vertical farm, which can bring local produce to densely packed city centers (where populations are predicted to double by 2050) without the need for farmland or even sun.
  • Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, still the reigning ranch champ, but hopefully from a compostable squeeze bottle by then
  • A squeaky-clean glass of locally (hyper-) filtered, recycled, delicious sewage water. In the next decade much of the world will experience shortages of fresh water and its cost will increase, especially in dry climates that already import water, like California.

 

2042: 20 Years

Personalized nutrition was the phrase I heard most from food industry experts, like the head of R&D at PepsiCo, which recently launched a sweat patch to tell you when you need more Gatorade (often). What 23andMe did for genetics, we’ll see in the nutrition and gut-health departments. Imagine a wristwatch that pings you when your sodium’s high. Cool! Creepy!

The Menu

  • Sustainably farmed, zero-waste salmon. Yes, we already have this, but the demand for proteins is predicted to increase 40 percent by 2050. Farmed salmon has a long way to go to be safer and less ridden with sea lice (don’t ask), but if people eat more fish than beef by 2042, we’ll be doing the planet a lot of good.
  • Protein-enhanced lentils—hey, the watch said you needed it—in a coconut milk broth seasoned with local greenhouse peppers because extreme weather in Latin America has made the imported ones too expensive.
  • Iced coffee made from medium-acidic, very tasty Coffea stenophyllabeans that can withstand warmer temperatures. Experts predict some 60 percent of coffee species could go extinct in the next 20 years due to extreme weather, deforestation, and human development.
  • Air fryers are out. Countertop 3D-printing ovens that transform shelf-stable foods into hot dishes are IN! This one baked you a tasty peach cobbler from canned peaches that were genetically edited for “low-chill” conditions (peaches need time in the cold to develop to their full potential, and warmer winters are already ruining entire crops).
  • Topped with crème fraîche (pricey but worth it) made of cream from a nearby midsize regenerative farm, which we’ll need to revive our soil and ensure a more reliable food supply. Certain staples of the American diet—meat, poultry, dairy—will forever remain in demand.

 

2122: 100 Years

Four science fiction writers with buzzy, brilliant books out this year muse on what they think we’ll be eating one hundred years from now. Thankfully, no one said Soylent Green.

The Menu

  • Cricket tartare (Portland-biodome-raised, certified organic) on a bed of Mariana Trench plankton from the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean, where we have yet to explore the possibilities of food. It’s served in an edible fungi tart dish from Le Creuset, a brand that will surely endure even as culinary innovations move from kitchens to biotech labs. This snack is brought to you by the inventive mind of Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark, which spans generations (and atmospheres) drastically shaped by a devastating worldwide plague…
  • Sustainably farmed mussels in a citrus broth covered by a gigantic supremed lime, says Sarah Blake. She’s the author of Clean Air, which takes place in a near-distant future where plants overproduce deadly pollen to save the planet’s ecosystems, killing a ton of humans while the rest live in domes and eat oversize produce farmed by robots.
  • In Goliath, novelist Tochi Onyebuchi imagines a future in which the rich have taken off for space colonies, leaving the rest on radiation-ruined Earth. A hundred years from now, coffee beans will be extinct (a real possibility), so Onyebuchi has us sipping java made from okra seeds, a significant cultural touchstone of Black cuisine even in the postapocalypse.
  • 3D-printed tortilla chips made from hydroponic black bean paste, with cell-cloned cheese sauce and jalapeños, all sourced from aerial farms in the upper atmosphere of Venus. In her optimistic vision of the future, author Martha Wells sees people living on space stations or on other planets after Earth’s resources have been depleted (you don’t want to hear the pessimistic version!). Wells’s next fantasy series, Witch King, is out May 2023.

 

 

Original article here

23 Apr 2024
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How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide

 

What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we recognize? In their book “Picturing the Mind,” Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science, pursue these and other questions through a series of “vistas” — over 65 brief, engaging texts, presenting some of the views of poets, philosophers, psychologists, and biologists, accompanied by Anna Zeligowski’s lively illustrations.

Each picture and text serves as a starting point for discussion. In the texts that follow, excerpted from the vista “How Did Consciousness Evolve?” the authors offer a primer on evolutionary theory, consider our evolutionary transition from nonsentient to sentient organisms, explore the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research, and ponder the origins and evolution of suffering and the imagination.

Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theory is a deceptively simple theory, which is why many people who have only a cursory acquaintance with it are nevertheless convinced that they fully understand it. Its basic assumptions are indeed simple. The first assumption, which was systematically explored first by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and then by Charles Darwin, is that there was a single ancestor, or very few ancestors, of all living organisms. This is the principle of Descent with modification: all organisms are descended, with modifications, from ancestors that lived long ago.

The second principle, which is central to Darwin’s theory, is the principle of Natural selection: organisms with hereditary variations that render them better adapted to their local environment than others in their population leave behind more offspring. Darwin showed that this simple process, when applied recursively, can account for the evolution of complex organs like the eye, and, with the addition of some plausible auxiliary hypotheses, can explain the diversity of living species and their geographic distribution. In the last paragraph of “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” Darwin summarized his ideas:

 

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less- improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

 

Once he put forward his ideas, various scientists tried to crystallize and summarize Darwin’s view. For example, in the twentieth century, John Maynard Smith suggested that four basic processes underlie evolution by natural selection:

(i) Multiplication: an entity gives rise to two or more others.

(ii) Variation: not all entities are identical.

(iii) Heredity: like usually begets like. Variant X usually begets offspring X, but infrequently begets offspring Y.

(iv) Competition: some heritable variations affect the success of entities in persisting and multiplying more than others.

Although it sounds simple, when we unpack these processes, we appreciate how complex evolutionary theory actually is. There are multiple ways in which reproduction occurs and there are different types of inherited variations. Maynard Smith, like most 20th-century biologists, focused on DNA- based genetic variability, but since the early 2000s, the idea that variations in DNA drive all evolutionary change has been abandoned; it is now recognized that heritable variations in DNA, in patterns of gene expression, in behavior, and in culture are all important. Variation in these hereditary units can arise randomly or can be partially directed because heredity and development can be coupled. For example, stressful conditions during development can induce changes in gene expression that can be transmitted to the next generation. It has also been accepted that there are multiple targets and levels of selection within individuals, between individuals and between lineages, and that organisms have fuzzy boundaries. (Are the symbiotic bacteria in your gut part of you?) Crucially, organisms are not passive subjects of natural selection — they actively construct the environment in which they are selected and bequeath these ecological legacies to their offspring.

 

As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

 

How, then, should evolutionary analysis proceed? We could start by tracing evolutionary change at the molecular-genetic, physiological-developmental, behavioral, or cultural levels. However, since organisms adjust to changing conditions in the external world and in their own genome by altering their behavior and physiology, cultural and behavioral adaptations frequently precede genetic changes and shape the conditions in which variations are selected. Genetic changes that stabilize or fine-tune the behavioral or developmental changes follow. As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

In the 21st century, this integrative approach to evolutionary reasoning, which incorporates the effects of variations in DNA, development, behavior, and culture is being embraced by a growing number of biologists, including us.

 

 

 

Evolutionary Transitions

How should we think about the evolutionary transition from non-sentient to sentient organisms? There are several useful ways of carving up the living world and thinking about evolutionary transitions between forms and ways of life. Ecologists distinguish between modes of living such as terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial modes, and study the transitions from water to land or from land to air. In contrast, evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have described major evolutionary transitions in terms of qualitative changes in the way information is stored, processed, and transmitted. Examples of such transitions include the transition from single cells to multicellular organisms, and the transition from nonlinguistic communication to communication through symbolic language.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests another way of thinking about broad patterns of life. He distinguishes four progressively sophisticated, hierarchically nested types of selection, which underlie what he calls a “generate-and- test- tower.” Organisms such as bacteria, sponges, and plants, which can adapt evolutionarily through natural selection, dwell on the first floor; the second floor is inhabited by organisms such as snails, fish, and mice, which, in addition to selection during evolutionary history, learn through trial-and-error and selective reinforcement during their lifetime. Organisms that can also select among imagined actions and scenarios, like elephants, dolphins, and great apes, live on the third floor, while human beings, with the extra capacity to select among symbolically represented possibilities and who are subject to cultural selection, live on the fourth.

None of these classifications explicitly mentions sentience. Sentience is, however, central to the view of Aristotle, which we described in the first vista. Aristotle distinguished between three goal-directed and hierarchically nested types of “soul,” or modes of living organization: the “nutritive-reproductive” soul of non-sentient organisms like plants, the goals of which are survival and reproduction; the “sensitive” soul of sentient organisms, whose goals are the fulfillment of desires and appetites; and the “rational” soul of humans, whose goal is to satisfy abstract symbolic values such as justice and beauty. In our book “The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul,” we reframed Aristotle’s hierarchy within the framework of evolutionary theory, and offered a unifying scheme for explaining the evolutionary transitions to life, sentience, and reflectivity.

An Evolutionary-Transition Approach to Consciousness

How can we develop an evolutionary theory of consciousness when there is so much disagreement over what consciousness is and which organisms are conscious? Our way of approaching this question takes as its inspiration the way the Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti tackled a similar problem, the problem of how life (another elusive notion) originated. Gánti started by compiling a list of capacities that, in spite of the different views about the nature of life, are generally deemed jointly sufficient for the simplest, “minimal” life. He then built a theoretical model of a minimal living system that implements all these capacities.

Following Gánti’s methodology, our first task is to identify a list of capacities that, when all are present, most consciousness researchers would regard as sufficient for an organism to be deemed minimally conscious. Such an organism would be able to perceive, feel, and think, from its own private point of view.

A consensus list of consciousness capacities is a step forward, but identifying each and every capacity may be difficult, and a list does not tell us how they interact to form a conscious being. If we could find a single system-property — an evolutionary marker of consciousness — that indicates that the organism has evolved all the capacities in the consensus list, we would be in a much better position. Finding such a single, diagnostic transition marker would make it possible to identify the simplest evolved conscious being, reconstruct the processes and structures that underlie it, and figure out how they interact. If we can follow the evolution of the marker and therefore the evolution of consciousness, we can discover when and how the conscious mode of being originated.

As we will see, evolutionary transition markers to the living, the living conscious, and (tentatively) the living-conscious-rational modes of being (the three Aristotelian “souls”) have been suggested. Each of these evolutionary transition markers entails a consensus list of capacities that are sufficient to allow us to ascribe the corresponding mode of being to an entity.

Learning and Consciousness: An Unlikely Relation?

Is there a single, tangible property that when present in an entity means that all the characteristics of consciousness are in place — an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness? We believe that we have identified such a marker. Our marker is a form of open-ended associative learning, which we call unlimited associative learning (UAL).

Before we describe this marker and argue our case, we must say a few words about learning and about the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research in the 20th century.

Learning, an experience-dependent change in behavior, requires (i) that a sensory stimulus leads to a change in the internal state of the system; (ii) that a memory trace of the internal change is stored through a process that involves positive or negative reinforcement; and (iii) that later exposures to the same or a similar stimulus are manifest as changes to the threshold of the behavioral response. Characterizing these processes, the relations between them, and the mechanisms underlying them in living organisms is a complex endeavor. Just as with evolutionary processes, where the nature of reproduction, variation production, and selection have to be qualified, the study of learning requires that we consider the kinds of stimuli that are attended to, the mechanisms of storage and of recall, the relevant rewards and punishments and the ways the organism responds.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness. This way of thinking changed dramatically with the advent of behaviorism, a strand of experimental psychology that dominated the English-speaking world from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1970s. Behaviorists redefined psychology as the study of learned behavior, scornfully objecting to any mention of terms like consciousness or mind. An influential psychology textbook from 1953 explained that notions like “mind” and “ideas” “are being invented on the spot for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them” (B. F. Skinner, “Science and Human Behavior”).

 

 

The behaviorists focused on two types of associative learning. In the first, classical or Pavlovian conditioning (named after the physiologist Ivan Pavlov), an animal learns that something it perceives, which is of no relevance to it (a “neutral stimulus” in the behaviorists’ jargon), predicts a stimulus that invariably accompanies a reward or a punishment such as food or pain, to which it reflexively responds. For example, the smell of food that accompanies the reward (food) elicits the salivation reflex in a hungry dog. The sound of a buzzer (or bell), on the other hand, normally does not elicit salivation — it is “neutral” with respect to salivation. However, it will eventually elicit salivation, even when there is no smell of food, if the buzz repeatedly occurs before the smell. Pavlov measured the internal state of the dog by counting the number of drops of saliva at different stages of learning.

In the second type of associative learning, Skinnerian conditioning (named after the psychologist B. F. Skinner), an animal learns what to do in order get a reward or avoid a punishment (known in behaviorist jargon as positive or negative reinforcement). For example, a hungry rat can learn to press a lever in its cage if this action is followed by the delivery of food. In general, actions that are followed by a positive (or negative) outcome will be more (or less) likely to occur in the future, under similar circumstances.

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world. Nevertheless, Skinner suggested that complex behavior, including the “verbal behavior” of humans (this was his term for language comprehension and production), is the result of a sequence of reinforcements.

 

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world.

 

The increasing tensions between the obvious limitations and the grandiose pretensions of behaviorism eventually led to its demise. However, the ongoing study of associative learning led to new insights. For example, it was discovered that learning depends on how surprising, how unexpected, the predictive neutral stimulus or action is of the reinforcement. A totally predictable stimulus requires no learning, whereas one that does not match expectations is newsworthy. Learning in animals, on which machine- learning algorithms are patterned, involves the updating and minimization of mismatched expectations.

The study of associative learning today includes the investigation of the underlying cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms in ecologically relevant conditions such as the social conditions in which animals learn from each other. It is a rich and productive research program, which is no longer constrained by the behaviorists’ maxims. There is an irony in our (qualified) return to the 19th-century suggestion that open-ended associative learning is an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness, the very term that behaviorists tried to purge from psychology.

 

Of course I do as I’m told.

Hunger and shock are great reinforcers

Push lever and

Obey the rule

And NEVER

Show my inner soul

~ Jane Monet

 

Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) Is the Evolutionary Transition Marker of Consciousness

What is the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness? Following Gánti’s methodology we started by compiling a consensus list of consciousness characteristics based on the work of psychologists, philosophers, and neurobiologists:

  • Binding/unification: seeing the apple as a composite whole (red, round, smooth) yet with discernable features
  • Global accessibility and broadcast: back and forth interactions among specialized brain modules allowing comparisons, discriminations, generalizations, and evaluations that inform decision-making
  • Selective attention and active exclusion: excluding or amplifying signals according to past and present context
  • Intentionality (aboutness; representation): the mapping (representations) of body, world, action, and their relations
  • Integration through time: Holding on to incoming information long enough for it to be integrated and evaluated, so the present can be said to have duration
  • Flexible evaluative system and goals: evaluating perceptions and actions as rewarding or punishing according to context
  • Agency and embodiment: inherent spontaneous activity and goal-directed behavior
  • A sense of self: registration of self/other and a stable perspective

On the basis of this list, we suggest that the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness, which is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time, is Unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time. An organism with a capacity for UAL can, during its own lifetime, go on learning from experience about the world and about itself in a practically unrestricted way.

 (i) It can distinguish between novel complex patterns of stimuli and actions. For example, it can learn to navigate in a new terrain — to discriminate between different types of animals, between different routes leading to food and shelter. The learned patterns are genuinely novel: they are not reflex-eliciting patterns, nor have they been learned in the past.

(ii) It manifests second-order learning: Once it learns a new complex image or a new pattern of action, these patterns can themselves become associated with new compound patterns, allowing the organism to build up chains of associative links.

(iii) It can learn even if there is a time gap between the “neutral” complex stimulus and the reinforcement (the reward or punishment). Such “trace conditioning” requires that the memory of the neutral predictive stimulus is stored even when the reinforcing stimulus is transiently unperceived.

(iv) The value of a learned pattern can be readily changed: the reward or punishment value of a particular stimulus or a particular action is not fixed. It can change when the conditions change. Something that once predicted punishment (e.g., danger) can predict reward (safety) when conditions alter.

If an animal shows unlimited associative learning (that is, practically unrestricted learning) it means that all the capacities of consciousness are in place. Unification and differentiation are needed to construct compound stimuli (an apple is perceived as both red and round); global accessibility is needed to enable integration of information from multiple systems (e.g., the visual, olfactory, memory and evaluative systems — the red apple has a specific fragrance and following past experience is expected to be rewarding); selective attention is needed to pick these stimuli out from the background (e.g., ignore green or badly smelling apples and pick only the red fragrant ones); intentionality is needed, since the system maps or represents stimuli and the relations between them (e.g., the animal has a cognitive map of its environment); integration over time is needed for being able to learn even when there is a time gap between the neutral and rewarding stimulus; a flexible evaluation system is needed to make context-dependent learning possible (e.g., alter the value of a stimulus from punishing to rewarding); embodied agency is needed for exploring the world and for learning associations between actions; a “self,” entailing a stable point of view, is needed to compare stimuli and actions from the same perspective, and self/world distinction is needed so that the organism will not confuse stimuli generated by its own actions with stimuli generated by the external world. An animal with UAL is able to exhibit many complex behaviors, and can attain many different goals. Moreover, there is evidence that an animal can manifest UAL only when it is conscious. UAL is therefore a good transition marker for consciousness.

The Origins of Suffering

Ecclesiastes said: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Knowledge and suffering are also entangled in the myth of original sin, in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” and in the myth of the eternally suffering Prometheus who blessed humans with the civilizing power of fire. What was the price of the knowledge-through-feelings that UAL inflicted on animals?

Like all great innovations, UAL opened a Pandora’s box of new challenges and problems. We believe that the greatest problem stemmed from overlearning: since parts of a sensory image can have different values (neutral, beneficial, life-threatening) in different conditions, false alarms are very likely. For example, for a fish, a particular pattern of vibrations combined with a particular pattern of colors can indicate a dangerous predator, while the color pattern alone and the vibration pattern alone may sometimes be associated with a nonthreatening passing animal. But since the rapid flight that the vibration or color pattern elicits is less costly than deathly injury, flight is preferable even if the vibration or color patterns turns out to be nonthreatening on most occasions. It is surely better to err on the side of caution. Randolph Nesse called the adaptive logic of erring on the side of caution the “smoke detector principle.”

 

Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases.

 

The price of overreacting includes, however, anxiety, paranoia, neuroses. Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases. Nevertheless, the cost-benefit balance is on the side of knowledge — a wise, suffering animal is better off than a nonsuffering, doomed fool.

Animals that could mitigate the high costs of UAL without giving up its benefits would have a great advantage. The evolutionary elaboration of the ubiquitous stress response and the evolution of active forgetting are some of the ameliorating mechanisms that we expect to find in all associatively learning animals, and in particular, in UAL animals. Suffering was not eliminated, but it became more controlled.

In the last paragraph of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin wrote: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” It was in the Cambrian, we suggest, that the great war of nature began to involve suffering — the subjective experiencing of the anguish and pain that is entangled with knowledge.

The Evolution of Imagination

The first conscious animals explored and learned about their world and the effects of their actions by seeking the satisfactions of food, sex, and social bonding and avoiding the pains and fears imposed by predators, deprivation, and disease. Their explorations were guided by what they learned in the past, which, in turn, led to further learning and exploration.

Driven by learning, consciousness and cognition evolved further. In some lineages, selection for increased learning capacity led to the gradual evolution of imaginative, dreaming animals. They did not just learn about aspects of their world; they also learned about how events unfolded in time. They recalled past events— they could recall when and where a particular event happened, and they planned ahead by recombining aspects of their recollections and evaluating the planned, imagined event. These animals, which inhabit the third floor in Dennett’s generate-and-test tower, could imagine different scenarios and choose between them.

 

 

Here is a famous example: Western scrub jays cache (in many locations) different types of foodstuff, such as tasty worms that rot within a short time, and less-favored peanuts that stay edible for much longer. They later remember not only where they cached the different foods, but also when: they recover worms soon after caching, and peanuts when they return to feed long after caching. Interestingly, they are aware of the possibility of theft by other jays. They re- cache food if they were watched while caching, but only if they themselves are thieves!

There are many examples of imaginative planning by birds and mammals, and there are more limited examples of the imaginative ability of some fish, bees, and cuttlefish. It is likely that imagination evolved gradually and to different degrees in different species. Curiously, most imaginative animals are social. Are their social sensibilities related to their imaginative capacities? Whatever the answer and however striking animal imagination is, it remains in the private domain. The ability to communicate about what one imagines is peculiar to humans.

 

 

 

Original article here

11 Mar 2024
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38 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

 

Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are a whole bunch of foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

 

  • Kummerspeck (German)
    Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

 

  • Shemomedjamo (Georgian)
    You know when you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it? The Georgians feel your pain. This word means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing.”

 

  • Tartle (Scots)
    The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

 

  • Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego)
    This word captures that special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do.

 

  • Backpfeifengesicht (German)
    A face badly in need of a fist.

 

  • Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
    You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.

 

  • Pelinti (Buli, Ghana)
    Your friend bites into a piece of piping hot pizza, then opens his mouth and sort of tilts his head around while making an “aaaarrrahh” noise. The Ghanaians have a word for that. More specifically, it means “to move hot food around in your mouth.”

 

  • Greng-jai (Thai)
    That feeling you get when you don’t want someone to do something for you because it would be a pain for them.

 

  • Mencolek (Indonesian)
    You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.

 

  • Faamiti (Samoan)
    To make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or child.

 

  • Gigil (Filipino)
    The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.

 

  • Yuputka (Ulwa)
    A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.

 

  • Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
    The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

 

  • Vybafnout (Czech)
    A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say boo.

 

  • Fremdschämen (German); Myötähäpeä (Finnish)
    The kinder, gentler cousins of Schadenfreude, both these words mean something akin to “vicarious embarrassment.”

 

  • Lagom (Swedish)
    Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish? This slippery little word is hard to define, but means something like, “Not too much, and not too little, but juuuuust right.”

 

  • Pålegg (Norwegian)
    Sandwich Artists unite! The Norwegians have a non-specific descriptor for anything – ham, cheese, jam, Nutella, mustard, herring, pickles, Doritos, you name it – you might consider putting into a sandwich.

 

  • Layogenic (Tagalog)
    Remember inCluelesswhen Cher describes someone as “a full-on Monet … from far away, it’s OK, but up close it’s a big old mess”? That’s exactly what this word means.

 

  • Bakku-shan (Japanese)
    Or there’s this Japanese slang term, which describes the experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

 

  • Seigneur-terraces (French)
    Coffee shop dwellers who sit at tables a long time but spend little money.

 

  • Ya’arburnee (Arabic)
    This word is the hopeful declaration that you will die before someone you love deeply, because you cannot stand to live without them. Literally, may you bury me.

 

  • Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
    “Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten.

 

  • Slampadato (Italian)
    Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.

 

  • Zeg (Georgian)
    It means “the day after tomorrow.” OK, we do have “overmorrow” in English, but when was the last time someone used that?

 

  • Cafune (Brazilian Portuguese)
    Leave it to the Brazilians to come up with a word for “tenderly running your fingers through your lover’s hair.”

 

  • Koi No Yokan (Japanese)
    The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love.

 

  • Kaelling (Danish)
    You know that woman who stands on her doorstep (or in line at the supermarket, or at the park, or in a restaurant) cursing at her children? The Danes know her, too.

 

  • Boketto (Japanese)
    It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

 

  • L’esprit de l’escalier (French)
    Literally, stairwell wit—a too-late retort thought of only after departure.

 

  • Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish)
    A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers.

 

  • Packesel (German)
    The packesel is the person who’s stuck carrying everyone else’s bags on a trip. Literally, a burro.

 

  • Hygge (Danish)
    Denmark’s mantra, hygge is the pleasant, genial, and intimate feeling associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends.

 

  • Cavoli Riscaldati (Italian)
    The result of attempting to revive an unworkable relationship. Translates to “reheated cabbage.”

 

  • Bilita Mpash (Bantu)
    An amazing dream. Not just a “good” dream; the opposite of a nightmare.

 

  • Litost (Czech)
    Milan Kundera described the emotion as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.”

 

  • Luftmensch (Yiddish)
    There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense.

 

  • 37 & 38. Schlemiel and schlimazel (Yiddish)
    Someone prone to bad luck. Yiddish distinguishes between the schlemiel and schlimazel, whose fates would probably be grouped under those of the klutz in other languages. The schlemiel is the traditional maladroit, who spills his coffee; the schlimazel is the one on whom it’s spilled.

 

 

 

 

Original article here