Cancer, our Doppelgänger

After 3 occurrences of cancer within the family (2 dead, one will go any day now) I finally bought this book I have been meaning to read since years. Brilliantly written, very easy reading for the layman. And a great reminder that any day you wake up and are still alive and well, and no one in your family is dying, you must remember to be happy and cheerful.
................................................................................................................................

"...This image - of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger - is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species and as an organism. [AM: cell division, cloning, survival of the fittest, growth via evolution]

...When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. The fittest cancer cell survives. This mirthless, relentless cycle of mutation, selection, and overgrowth generates cells that are more and more adapted to survival and growth. In some cases, the mutations speed up the acquisition of other mutations. The genetic instability, like a perfect madness, only provides more impetus to generate mutant clones.

Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so too is this incredible disease that lurks inside us."

Page 38, 'The Emperor of Maladies, A Biography of Cancer', Siddhartha Mukherjee
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 2011
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011

A relationship is a physiologic process

"Dozens of studies demonstrate that solitary people have a vastly increased rate of premature death from all causes - they are three to five times likelier to die early than people with ties to a caring spouse, family, or community.

With results like these backing the medical efficacy of mammalian congregation, you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine.

Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don't believe in them; they can't bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment.

The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."

Page 80, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Limbic Resonance, or the Ancient Ability to Read Minds

"...Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance - a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity.

Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.

So familiar and expected is the neural attunement of limbic resonance that people find its absence disturbing. Scrutinize the eyes of a shark or a sunbathing salamander and you get back no answering echo, no flicker of recognition, nothing. The vacuity behind those glances sends a chill down the mammalian spine.

...To the animals capable of bridging the gap between minds, limbic resonance is the door to communal connection. Limbic resonance supplies the wordless harmony we see everywhere but take for granted - between mother and infant, between a boy and a dog, between lovers holding hands across a restaurant table. This silent reverberation between minds is so much a part of us that, like the noiseless machinations of the kidney or the liver, it functions smoothly and continuously without our notice.

...It seems a strange irony that we need science to rekindle faith in the ancient ability to read minds. That old skill, so much a part of us, is not much believed in now. Those who spend their days without an opportunity for quiet listening can pass a lifetime and overlook it altogether.

The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses - a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began."

Page 63 - 65,  'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Evolution is not an upward staircase. And why we write/read poetry

Evolution is not an upward staircase

"Many people conceive of evolution as an upward staircase, an unfolding sequence that produces ever more advanced organisms. From this perspective, the advantages of the neocortex - speech, reason, abstraction - would naturally be judged the highest attributes of human nature.

But the vertical conceptualization of evolution is fallacious. Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today.

We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three [the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex], but simply the most recent.

Poetry, a bridge between two brains

.....Because people are the most aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure of argument and will. Not so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of three. Much of one's mind does not take orders. "From modern neuroanatomy," writes a pair of neuroscience researchers, "it is apparent that the entire neocortex of humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it is evolved.

...A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency in discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview.

...Only the latest of the three brains traffics in logic and reason, and it alone can utilize the abstract symbols we know as words. The emotional brain, although inarticulate and unreasoning, can be expressive and intuitive, Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move us in ways beyond logic that have only the most inexact translations in a language the neocortex can comprehend.

...And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straitjacket of verbal expression....Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful."

Page 32 - 34, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

The Social Genome

Die, selfish gene, die
For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us?
David Dobbs

"... If faced with clues that food might be scarce, such as hunger or crowding, certain grasshopper species can transform within days or even hours from their solitudinous hopper states to become part of a maniacally social locust scourge. They can also return quickly to their original form."

"...This raises a question: if merely reading a genome differently can change organisms so wildly, why bother rewriting the genome to evolve? How vital, really, are actual changes in the genetic code? Do we always need DNA changes to adapt to new environments? Are there other ways to get the job done? Is the importance of the gene as the driver of evolution being overplayed?"

"...Perhaps better then to speak not of genes but the genome — all your genes together. And not the genome as a unitary actor, but the genome in conversation with itself, with other genomes, and with the outside environment. If grasshoppers becoming locusts, sweet bees becoming killers, and genetic assimilation are to be believed it’s those conversations that define the organism and drive the evolution of new traits and species. It’s not a selfish gene or a solitary genome. It’s a social genome."

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/?fb_ref=Default

Brian Cox visits the world's biggest vacuum chamber

Brian Cox visits the world's biggest vacuum chamber - Human Universe: Episode 4 Preview - BBC Two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E43-CfukEgs

How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases

"Biases often work in surreptitious ways — they sneak in through the backdoor of our conscience, our good-personhood, and our highest rational convictions, and lodge themselves between us and the world, between our imperfect humanity and our aspirational selves, between who we believe we are and how we behave.

Those stealthy inner workings of bias are precisely what NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explores in The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives (public library) — a sweeping, eye-opening, uncomfortable yet necessary account of how our imperceptible prejudices sneak past our conscious selves and produce “subtle cognitive errors that lay beneath the rim of awareness,” making our actions stand at odds with our intentions and resulting in everything from financial errors based on misjudging risk to voter manipulation to protracted conflicts between people, nations, and groups."

Read excerpts here:

The Hidden Brain: How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases
Maria Popova

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/09/the-hidden-brain-shankar-vedantam/

Vastness

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."

Carl Sagan in 'Contact'

Live from Space

Almost a kind of meditation, as you move from country to country, see ocean depths, continents emerging. Check out the options on the right and left - you can even listen to the music trending in the country the Space Station is flying over, or watch a live video from the Space Station, even listen to the crew speaking to Mission Control, if you happen to be there at the right time. A great way to keep children occupied while they learn amazing facts about the earth and various countries.

Live from Space: The International Space Station

"The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the earth at over 17,000 mph. See the world from the perspective of its astronauts and discover what's happening on the ground right now."

Click on the Explore Earth button in here -  http://livefromspace.com/

Near-death experiences are 'electrical surge in dying brain'

"A lot of people thought that the brain after clinical death was inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show that is definitely not the case.

"If anything, it is much more active during the dying process than even the waking state."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23672150

What can a brain scan tell about free will?

Will scientific progress undermine our sense that we have free will? Will it eventually lead us to conclude that free will is an illusion?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23666726

Prairie Dog Grammar

“Biologist Constantin Slobodchikoff, in his twenty years of researching communication patterns among prairie dogs, has proven that they have the most sophisticated animal language decoded so far. Not only do sentinel prairie dogs warn the colony of impending danger from a predator, they have different calls for different species of predator, be it a badger, a red-tailed hawk, or an eagle. They can incorporate descriptive information about the individual predator including size, color and how fast they are traveling.

Focusing primarily on Gunnison’s prairie dogs near Flagstaff, Arizona, he has also found variations within prairie dog speech – call them dialects – that differ from region to region.  But studies have shown that they do understand one other. Their use of language includes not only nouns, but modifiers, and the ability to coin new words. To date, one hundred words have been identified among Gunnison’s prairie dogs. And now, with the use of advanced technology, Dr. Slobodchikoff is in the process of deconstructing prairie dog grammar. “A short chirp, about a tenth of a second, is analogous to a sentence or paragraph… If we dissect the chirp into a bunch of different time slices, each slice has some specific information in it. Time slices become words and the assemblage of an idea appears.

"...One of my Ph D students did a comparative study of the alarm calls of all five species of prairie dogs, calling for her when she was wearing a yellow shirt or a green one. All fives species had distinctly different calls for the two colors of shirts. Also, each species had different vocalizations for each color, suggesting that each species has its own language, but the languages differs from one another, much as German, French and English differ."

Page 54, ‘Finding Beauty in a Broken World’, Terry Tempest Williams

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Beauty-Broken-World-Vintage/dp/0375725199

A continuing act of creation

"Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation.

Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input."

The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions
Maria Popova

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/

We're just a bit of pollution :)

In today's excerpt - astronomers and physicists are now grappling with evidence that suggests that all the things we can observe in the universe with even the most powerful telescopes is only four percent of what is there. The rest, they posit, is dark matter and dark energy:

"... 'Dark,' cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not 'dark' as in distant or invisible. This is not "dark" as in black holes or deep space. This is 'dark' as in unknown for now, and possibly forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent some­thing even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. 

As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, 'We're just a bit of pollution.' Get rid of us and of every­thing else we've ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. 'We're completely irrelevant,' he adds, cheerfully. 

The Descendants of Sisyphus

Every time it rains, ant houses must be flooded, right? And so throughout the rainy season, do ants spend most of their time choking with rain water and mud, having the roof come down on their heads, struggling to get out, watching their families die, their carefully stored food washed away, and then when the rain stops, go down and bring out all that mud in small lilliputian mouthfuls, without pausing to grieve - and then go through the entire process again and again and again? (Any myrmecologists out there who can answer this?)

You mean they live through this destruction and reconstruction and destruction, ad infinitum, all their short lives?

Is it easier for them to be Sisyphus-es because they cannot think or remember, and therefore cannot despair?

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise"*.

Is there another lesson here apart from the hard work?

*Proverbs 6:6. The New Testament

Photo from Google Images

Less is more

"...For many years, Hans Kuhn, a German chemist from Gottingen, has championed a related line of thought applied to biological systems. In an attempt to understand the origins and evolution of life, he has focussed on the discarding of information along the way. According to Kuhn, biological evolution consists of a series of choices where an organism relates to its surroundings. These surroundings subject it to pressure, and it must choose to act in order to survive. Its genes contain experience in survival-otherwise there would be no organism, and no genes.

The more the organism survives, the more it experiences. And the more valuable its genes become. So the interesting thing is not how many genes it has-i.e., how long its DNA is. The interesting thing is the wealth of experience deposited in its genes.

The information an organism contains in its genes has a value that is proportional to the mass of experiences compressed there. What's interesting is not the face value of the information-i.e., the size of the genes-but rather the information discarded. "This quality constitutes knowledge, where 'knowledge' is measured by the total number of bits to be discarded," Kuhn wrote. Biological knowledge, then, is defined simply as discarded information.

This also disposes of a problem that bothered many scientists when it was discovered. Lilies have far more DNA than human beings. They are beautiful, yes, but surely they are not wiser?"

Chapter 4: The Depth of Complexity. Part 1: Computation
from the book -
‘The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness down to Size’
Tor Norretranders Translated by Jonathan Sydenham

Reductionism

"...In a Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking pointed his mental radio telescope at the remnants of the Big Bang, and what he saw was God. We don't want to point you in that direction.

A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution has a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not imply that dynamical systems are goal-seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the "goal"is when they have found it.

The fallacy of seeing God in the Big Bang is the leap of logic from "There is a dynamic in the universe that created us and makes us feel at home" to "The universe was set up in order to create us and make us feel at home". It may have been, but the discovery of a dynamic does not of itself imply any such thing.

However, as with the anthropic principle, it is tempting to derive a sense of purpose from a dynamic and see it as a spiritual frame that we must use. "We are here because we are meant to be here". Well, we may be and we may not. But because of the shared dynamic, we feel at home here-whether we are a goal or an accidental by-product- so the dynamic provides a spiritual frame that we find both comforting and awe-inspiring.

Romanticism alone is empty. Reductionism alone can provide a strong feeling of sympathy with the universe. We understand individual bits and pieces; we can kind of see how a tree works, how it gets its water into the topmost branches. But the shared dynamic goes much further: it creates a feeling of empathy with the universe. Put your cheek against a tree and feel the roughness of the bark against your skin."

'The Collapse of Chaos - Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World'
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart

Apoptosis

"Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death (PCD) that may occur in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, loss of cell membrane asymmetry and attachment, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation."

"Neuroimaging studies of individuals with bipolar disorder or other mood disorders also suggest evidence of cell loss in these same brain regions. Thus, a suggested cause of bipolar disorder is abnormal programmed cell death, or apoptosis, in critical brain circuitry that regulates emotion."

Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe, and Everything

Best talk I've ever heard in my life.

"Blind river dolphins, reclusive lemurs, a parrot as fearless as it is lovelorn ... Douglas Adams' close encounters with these rare and unusual animals reveal that evolution, ever ingenious, can be fickle too -- in a University of California talk that sparkles with his trademark satiric wit."

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_and_everything.html

Strugatsky: Reason

Excerpt from 'Roadside Picnic' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the book on which Andrei Tarkovsky's haunting film 'The Stalker' is loosely based on.

Tarkovsky really takes the story to another plane altogether. He builds in layers of philosophical meaning on a story about an extraterrestrial visitation. I got the book from here - http://www.flipkart.com/.

............................................................................

"...All right, I'll tell you. But I must warn you that your question, Richard, comes under the heading of xenology. Xenology: an unnatural mix of science fiction and formal logic. It's based on the false premise that human psychology is applicable to extraterrestrial intelligent beings."

"Why is that false?" Noonan asked.

"Because biologists have already been burned trying to use human psychology on animals. Earth animals, at that."

Forgive me, but that's an entirely different matter. We're talking about the psychology of rational beings."

"Yes. And everything would be fine if we only knew what reason was."

"Don't we know?" Noonan was surprised.

"Believe it or not, we don't. Usually a trivial definition is used: reason is that part of man's activity that distinguishes him from the animals. You know, an attempt to distinguish the owner from the dog who understands everything but just can't speak."

"....Or how about this hypothetical definition. Reason is a complex type of instinct that has not yet been formed completely. This implies that instinctual behaviour is always purposeful and natural. A million years from now our instinct will have matured and we will stop making the mistakes that are probably integral to reason.

And then, if something should change in the universe, we will all become extinct - precisely because we will have forgotten how to make mistakes, that is, to try various approaches not stipulated by an inflexible program of permitted alternatives."

Page 100.