Angel climbing Jacob's Ladder on the west front of Bath Abbey. I sense a very human effort here, the weight of a human body, with the extra burden of wings. Perhaps the most unusual presentation of an angel ever . . . (Why climb if you can fly? But we respond to the struggling angel precisely because he's so human.)*
ANGEL ENVY
“What is it,” the nun intones,
“that we envy angels?”
Angel-envying eight-year-olds,
we all shout, “Wings!”
“No, no, no,” chimes the nun.
“Think about it: angels can see
God.” We think about it.
We still want wings.
“And what is it,” the nun presses on,
“that holy angels envy us?”
We squirm on the hard benches.
“Angels envy us our bodies.”
We almost stop breathing.
*
“Angels are made of aura-like
material,” a New-Age half-nun
gasps in a half-whisper.
“When two angels stand close,
their wings inter-penetrate.”
I think of Milton’s
Easier than Air with Air,
if spirits embrace, total they mix.
That’s what I always wanted —
blind Milton, how did you
divine — beyond the startling
rose of genitals, entirely
entering each other.
*
If spirits embrace . . . .
But can angels croon Mmmm . . .
Later, can they lazily
disentangle themselves
to get up and go pee?
Virgin nun of my childhood,
many years late I raise my hand.
In your gray habit and unloved
black shoes,
how did you know
what the angels crave:
our bodies, soft as regret;
our laughter so much like pain.
*
Between dream and star,
angels ascend and descend
while we sleep like Jacob
on his pillow of stone. I still
think about it: we don’t want to
see God. We want wings.
~ Oriana
Children want wings because flying looks like great fun. Prisoners want wings because it’s a promise of escape, of freedom. Wings can be a metaphor for being able to escape whatever life throws at you. My mother used to lug around all kinds of extra shoes, clothes, etc. — “just in case.” Possibly a wartime mentality. Yet whatever we carry because of insecurity typically becomes a burden. We can be a prisoner of our “wings” (nonfunctional anyway).
And note that these days most of our angels are found in cemeteries — yes, relics of another era, but a reminder that angels too have become more and more humanized, and are supposedly grieving. And one of the most iconic modern movies has been “Wings of Desire,” showing angels as indeed wishing to have human bodies and emotions — the opposite of the ideal of being a disembodied soul flying from cloud to cloud, not burdened not just by the demands of the body but by relationships, work, “better homes and gardens,” all the ten thousand things. We finally recognize that a disembodied soul, separated from gristle and bone and tears and laughter, is not only impossible, but also empty and meaningless.
*
WHICH ANIMALS RECOGNIZE THEMSELVES IN A MIRROR?
~ “The idea for a tool to probe the basis of consciousness came to Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. while shaving. “It just occurred to me,” he says, “wouldn’t it be interesting to see if other creatures could recognize themselves in mirrors?”
Showing chimpanzees their reflections seemed like a fascinating little experiment when he first tried it in the summer of 1969. He didn’t imagine that this would become one of the most influential—and most controversial—tests in comparative psychology, ushering the mind into the realm of experimental science and foreshadowing questions on the depth of animal suffering. “It’s not the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror that is important,” he would come to believe. “It’s what that says about your ability to conceive of yourself in the first place.”
Gallup was a new professor at Tulane University in Louisiana, where he had access to the chimps and gorillas at what would later be known as the Tulane National Primate Research Center. The chimpanzees there had been caught as youngsters in Africa and shipped to America, where they were used mainly in biomedical research. By comparison, his experiment was far less invasive. He isolated two chimps in cages, and placed a mirror in each cage for eight hours at a time over 10 days. Through a hole in the wall, Gallup witnessed a shift in the chimps’ behavior. First they treated the reflection like it was another chimp, with a combination of social, sexual, and aggressive gestures. But over time, they started using it to explore their own bodies. “They’d use the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths, to make faces at the mirror, to inspect their genitals, to remove mucous from the corner of their eyes,” Gallup says.
Gallup was sure that the chimps had learned to recognize themselves in the mirror, but he didn’t trust that other researchers would be convinced by his descriptions. So he moved on to phase two of the experiment. He anesthetized the chimps, then painted one eyebrow ridge and the opposite ear tip with a red dye that the chimps wouldn’t be able to feel or smell. If they truly recognized themselves, he thought he knew what would happen: “It seemed pretty obvious that if I saw myself in a mirror with marks on my face, that I’d reach up and inspect those marks.”
That’s exactly what the chimps did. As far as Gallup was concerned, that was proof: “the first experimental demonstration of a self-concept in a subhuman form,” he wrote in the resulting 1970 report in Science. “It was just clear as day,” he remembers. “It didn’t require any statistics. There it was. Bingo.”
But the result that really blew Gallup’s mind came when he tested monkeys, and discovered that they did not do the same. The ability to recognize one’s reflection seemed not to be a matter of learning abilities, with some species being slower than others. It was an issue of higher intellectual capacity. Gallup had obtained the first good evidence that our closest relatives share with us a kind of self-awareness or even consciousness, to the exclusion of other animals. Here, finally, was an experimental handle on a topic that had been the subject of speculation for millennia: What is the nature of human consciousness?
Gallup wasn’t the first to come up with the notion that it might be significant if a person or animal recognizes itself in the mirror. He would only later learn that Charles Darwin had shown mirrors to orangutans, but they didn’t figure the mirror out, at least while he was watching. Darwin had also noted that, for their first few years, his children couldn’t recognize themselves in their reflections. In 1889, German researcher Wilhelm Preyer became the first to posit a connection between mirror self-recognition and an inner sense of self in people.
More than 50 years later, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan conceived of a childhood “mirror stage,” in which mirrors contribute to the formation of the ego. By 1972, developmental psychologists started using mark tests similar to Gallup’s to pin down the age at which children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror: 18 to 24 months.
Meanwhile Gallup, who moved to the University at Albany-SUNY, became interested in whether any non-primates could pass. In the early 1990s, he encouraged one of his Ph.D. students, Lori Marino, to explore the question. Working with Diana Reiss at Marine World Africa USA in California, Marino exposed two bottlenose dolphins at an aquarium to a mirror. Like the chimpanzees, the dolphins learned to use the mirror in a variety of ways, even “having sex in front of the mirror with each other, which we call our dolphin porno tapes,” Marino says. The three researchers published the results, saying they were “suggestive” of mirror self-recognition.
Still, they were missing the crucial mark test for another decade. The biggest hurdle was anatomical: The dolphins didn’t have hands to touch a mark. But Reiss and Marino, by then at the New York Aquarium, designed a modified test. When marked with black ink on various parts of their bodies, the dolphins flipped and wriggled in an attempt to see it, convincing the researchers and many others that they recognized themselves.
For support, he points to the fact that children start to demonstrate theory of mind at roughly around the same time that they start to recognize themselves in the mirror. “You have to be aware of yourself in the first place in order to begin to take into account what other people may know, want, or intend to do,” he says. He notes that people with schizophrenia often cannot recognize themselves in the mirror, and they struggle with theory of mind as well. For example, compared to controls, schizophrenic individuals were less likely to understand a request hidden in a husband’s statement to his wife, “I want to wear that blue shirt, but it’s very creased.”
Gallup suggests that a powerful sense of self may have evolved because it helped great apes deal with complex social situations. “Intellectual prowess supplanted physical prowess as a means of achieving dominance,” he says. And, he suggests that strong self-awareness may also entail death-awareness. “The next step, it seems to me logically, is to confront and eventually grapple with the inevitability of your own individual demise,” he says.
As for why dolphins and other non-primates recognize themselves in mirrors, Gallup isn’t yet convinced they do. He suggests an alternative explanation for why his former student’s dolphins wriggled in the mirror: to see marks on what they perceived as another dolphin peering back at them. And he requires replication of recent studies finding that elephants use their trunks to touch white crosses on their foreheads, and magpies dislodge stickers on their chests with their beaks.
Then there are researchers who discount whether the mirror test says anything about theory of mind in any animal, including humans. Most notably, Gallup’s mentee, Daniel Povinelli. Like a son who witnesses his father’s foibles and decides to become his opposite, Povinelli, now at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, has become one Gallup’s most outspoken critics, even as they remain close on a personal level. He’s come to believe that a chimp doesn’t need to have an integrated sense of self in order to pass the mirror test. Instead, it needs only to notice that the body in the mirror looks and moves the same as its own body, and then make the connection that if there’s a spot on the body in the mirror, there could also be a spot on its own body. That ability would still be pretty sophisticated, Povinelli adds, and it might reflect a keen awareness of the position of body parts that would likely be very helpful for swinging through trees. Indeed, he speculates that this high-level physical self-awareness may have developed when our tree-dwelling ancestors increased in size and faced more challenges while navigating their branchy, leafy world.
Povinelli’s critiques aside, most comparative psychologists say there’s something to mirror recognition, not least because it’s only been observed in intellectually superior animals. Neuroscientists are now trying to shed light on the matter by searching for a physical basis for the ability in the brain.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-do-animals-see-in-a-mirror?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Chimps, bonobos, and orangutans have all passed the mirror self-recognition test. Studies of gorillas have been inconclusive. The problem may be that gorillas avoid eye-contact, which may prevent them from studying the reflection in the mirror long enough to learn to recognize they are seeing themselves and not another gorilla.
Dogs always appear to treat their mirror image as another dog. But let's remember that dogs rely on their extremely keen sense of smell rather than their relatively limited eyesight.
*
THE FUTURE OF WATER: DESALINIZATION
~ “We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.
Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.
The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”
That water stress has been a major factor in the turmoil tearing apart the Middle East, but Bar-Zeev believes that Israel’s solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.
Bar-Zeev acknowledges that water will likely be a source of conflict in the Middle East in the future. “But I believe water can be a bridge, through joint ventures,” he says. “And one of those ventures is desalination.”
In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops.
Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.
And that, according to the authors of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria,” they wrote, “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”
Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.
Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.
But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.
Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.
The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel’s farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?
Water Diplomacy
Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.
Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).
The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.
What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it.
Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.
On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.
The contrasts couldn’t be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule.” ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/
*
WHY WATER IS WEIRD
~ “Water breaks all the rules. Since the 19th century, chemists have developed a robust framework to describe what liquids are and what they can do. Those ideas are almost useless at explaining the weird behavior of water. Its strangeness underlies what happens every time you drop an ice cube into a drink. Think about it for a moment: in front of you is a solid, floating on its liquid. Solid wax doesn’t float on melted wax; solid butter doesn’t float on melted butter in a hot saucepan; rocks don’t float on lava when it spews out of a volcano.
Ice floats because water expands when it freezes. If you’ve left a bottle of fizz in the freezer overnight, you’ll know that this expansion is a powerful force: strong enough to shatter glass. This seems like a small and inconsequential curiosity, but this anomaly – one of water’s plethora of strange and unique behaviors – has shaped our planet and the life that exists on it.
Through aeons of cycles of freezing and melting, water has seeped into giant boulders, cracked those rocks apart and broken them up into soil. Ice floats in our drinks, but also across our oceans as sea ice and glittering icebergs. In frozen lakes and rivers, the ice does more than decorate the surface; it insulates the water underneath, keeping it a few degrees above freezing point, even in the harshest of winters.
Water is at its most dense at 4C and, at that temperature, will sink to the bottom of a lake or river. Because bodies of water freeze from the top down, fish, plants and other organisms will almost always have somewhere to survive during seasons of bitter cold, and be able to grow in size and number. Over geological time, this oddity has allowed complex life to survive and evolve despite the Earth’s successive ice ages, periods when fragile life forms would have otherwise been wiped out on the desiccated, frozen ground and – if water behaved like a normal liquid – in solidified seas, too.
If you thought that was strange, how about this: hot water freezes faster than cold water. It’s a peculiarity known as the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian high-school student named Erasto B Mpemba, who found in 1963 that hot ice-cream mix froze faster than a colder mix in a classroom experiment. Though ridiculed by his teacher, Mpemba was not alone in noticing this peculiar effect of water – Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes have all written about it.
To understand why water bends all the rules, think about how an insect – a water strider, say – can zip along the surface of a pond. It doesn’t fall into the depths because of the water’s surface tension, which is immense when compared with that of other liquids. This comes about because of the intriguing ability of water molecules to stick to each other. In the liquid form, the hydrogen atoms of one water molecule are attracted to the oxygen atom of another molecule. Each water molecule can form up to four of these hydrogen bonds and, collectively, they give water a cohesiveness unique in liquids. This explains why water is a liquid on the surface of the Earth: the hydrogen bonds hold the molecules together in such a way that more energy than normal is needed to separate them, for example if you want to boil the liquid into a gas.
It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of the hydrogen bonds in water. They enable water molecules to pull each other through the tiniest blood vessels in your body – often working against the force of gravity – carrying oxygen and nutrients to parts that would otherwise be hard to reach. The same mechanism means that plants can suck water up from deep below the Earth’s surface to nourish the leaves and branches that grow in the sunshine.
Water’s stickiness makes possible other everyday phenomena we take for granted: it means we can pump water around the radiators in our homes, squeeze orange juice out of the carton at breakfast, and hose the flowerbeds in our gardens. All these things are possible because water is difficult to compress – the molecules attract each other and, in their natural state, tend to stay closer together than the molecules in other liquids. The harder something is to compress, the easier it is to move it around if you apply a pressure to one side of it. (A liquid being incompressible might not sound too abnormal, but water takes it to different levels – even at a mile deep, the ocean’s water is squashed in volume by only about 1%.)
Water is not only attracted to itself but will stick to almost anything else it comes across. It is the closest thing we have to a universal solvent, able to tear apart other compounds. Common salt, which is made up of crystals of sodium chloride, easily dissolves in water because the hydrogen bonds pull the sodium and chlorine atoms away from the crystal, leaving them to float freely through the liquid. Water is such a good solvent, in fact, that it is almost impossible to find naturally in a pure state; even producing pure samples in the laboratory is difficult. Almost every known chemical compound will dissolve in water to a small (but detectable) extent. Because of that, water is one of the most reactive and corrosive chemicals we know.
That ability to interact with so many things is crucial for life. It means that water can dissolve a wide variety of nutrients and other ingredients and move them around our bodies. The basic molecules of life – DNA, proteins, molecules that make up cell membranes, etc – wouldn’t work without water. Evolution has shaped these long, sophisticated molecules so that they have certain sections that easily mix with water, using hydrogen bonds, and other sections that shun water, like oil refusing to mix. The billions of protein molecules inside your body only fold into the right shapes to do their jobs because their interaction with water nudges them into the correct three-dimensional formats.
Think of a liquid and it will most likely be water. Even if you think of blood, beer or apple juice, you’re thinking of water with a small amount of other things dissolved or suspended within it. There are other pure liquids that appear in everyday life, such as petroleum or cooking oil, but there aren’t many and we do not interact with them anywhere near as frequently. Water is so common and so familiar that it is mundane: every day we drink it, touch it, wash with it, wet things, dry things, we boil it, freeze it and swim in it. We live in a world where the environmental conditions allow us to explore the landscape of water at different temperatures and pressures; where it can slide comfortably between solid, liquid and gas (or sometimes all three at once). The more we examine water, the stranger it gets. We study it because we are made from it, and it is, perhaps, surprising that the thing we are made from is still such a mystery.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/11/water-weirdest-liquid-planet-scientists-h2o-ice-firefighters
*
HAS THE MYSTERY OF WATER FINALLY BEEN SOLVED?
In their 2018 study, Hajime Tanaka, John Russo, and Kenji Akahane—all researchers in the Department of Fundamental Engineering at the University of Tokyo, in Japan—tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are more dense than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. Water also becomes less viscous compared to other liquids when compressed, and has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life.
The researchers, with the benefit of supercomputers, were able to tweak and untune a computational model of water, making it behave like other liquids. “With this procedure,” Russo said, “we have found that what makes water behave anomalously is the presence of a particular arrangement of the water’s molecules, such as the tetrahedral arrangement, where a water molecule is hydrogen-bonded to four molecules located on the vertices of a tetrahedron,” a shape of four triangular planes.
“Four of such tetrahedral arrangements can organize themselves in such a way that they share a common water molecule at the center without overlapping,” Russo said. As a result, when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than the disordered structure of liquid water, which is why water props ice up. Both highly ordered and disordered tetrahedral arrangements give water its “peculiar properties.” The paper’s title spells this out: “Water-like anomalies as a function of tetrahedrality.”
The ancient Greeks may have been wrong about water being an essential element, but Saykally says it’s no coincidence that water is essential for life on Earth. “It’s something intrinsic about water in that the strong tetrahedral hydrogen bond network that water makes is a very flexible environment for chemical processes to happen,” he said. “It has the right properties to dissolve many ions; it has the right properties to cause what we call hydrophobic materials”—like proteins—“to fold up in special ways.”
Saykally has invented a new laser to study water clusters, with the ultimate goal of producing “the perfect model for water,” he said. “We want to combine all the information available from studies of water clusters with our terahertz laser spectroscopy—from quantum chemical calculations and from condensed phase measurements—and make a computer model of water that will answer any question you ask. That perfect water model is what we have been calling the universal first principles model of water.” ~
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-water-is-weird
Iceberg off Antarctica*
THE TWO MEANINGS OF MASKS
~ “For all the mask’s prominence in horror cinema, it’s relatively rare for real world mass murderers and serial killers to wear masks in the commission of their ghastly crimes, so it’s strange that this has become such an iconic part of slasher lore. You might expect the actual instruments of murder to be the most terrifying elements of a scary movie, but at least as many viewers point to the villains’ masks as to their weapons when pinpointing the real root of their fear. Why might Jason’s goalie mask terrorize us more than his machete? Why might Michael’s blank, featureless façade instill more fear than his kitchen knife? Masks unsettle us because they force us to face fundamental metaphysical truths.
Throughout history, our ancestors have worn masks of one kind or another for the purposes of entertainment, mockery, ritual, protection, concealment, and transformation. A new face allows a person to take on a new role, to become someone else. Masks, in this way, have always been an essential part of our human need to play with identity. Their ability to promote this type of play—“playing pretend”—is contingent upon their capacity to disguise the wearer, conceal the face, and cloak what we suppose is the true self.
In the most basic sense then, masks disturb us because they are, by definition, objects that cover all or part of the face, and facial recognition is a foundational aspect of generating human understanding and compassion. Our brains are specialized to recognize faces, analyze them for useful data, and empathize with them. We remember the faces of others much better than, say, their fingers, shoulders, or bellybuttons. We glean from a face much valuable information that can help us guess a person’s age, gender, race, nationality, health, economic status, psychological condition, emotional state, etc. We also communicate, commiserate, and connect through our faces. Thus, a person’s face becomes a synecdoche for the self.
Masking one’s face is a way to avoid being remembered, a way to refuse giving information, a way to eschew connection. Masks give the wearer the one thing we don’t want a killer to have: anonymity. If we can see his face, then there’s a chance we can empathize with him, encourage empathy in return, perhaps talk him out of the whole thing—and if we’re lucky enough to escape, seeing the perpetrator’s face would help us describe him to a police sketch artist or point him out in a line-up.
The mask acts as a barrier, a wall not only between us and him, but between us and understanding. Much of our fear comes from the fact that we don’t know—can’t know—who or what hides behind the mask. Indeed, in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the big reveal is that the man behind that film’s hockey mask isn’t Jason Voorhees at all, but a copycat killer. This conceit is played to horrifying effect in Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, where a strange man wanders a carnival in a Frankenstein’s Monster costume. When he is finally unmasked, what is revealed under the disguise is a nightmarish mutant face, so terrifying that the viewer almost longs for the comfort of the classic Universal creature’s green facial features. Here, the mask masks the true horror, an even more disturbing and unfathomable substrate; here, “horror is the removal of masks,” as Psycho author Robert Bloch claimed.
Though it is undeniably true that masks mask—that they promote concealment, performance, deception—there is another contradictory function of the mask. As Oscar Wilde famously declared, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Fernando Pessoa put it more poetically: “Masquerades disclose the reality of souls.” In other words, masks don’t merely conceal, they reveal. The mask may be a lie, but it is a lie that allows us to realize truth, to unveil reality, to disclose secrets, to perform honestly. In this “honest performance” paradox lies the truths of masks and metaphysics.
Not only does the mask paradoxically allow us to both play pretend and get at truth, but it manages to enact that underlying contradiction, revealing the lie as truth and the truth as lie. Identity, far from being an affinity, is a dance over an abyss. The chasm of self can only be crossed with an ever-expanding bridge of infinite masks.
“Every profound spirit needs a mask,” claimed Friedrich Nietzsche, “even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.” Our masks are not ours alone. They grow around us even when we don’t intentionally put them on. Others mask us as often as we mask ourselves—which is to say always. Without masks, we are shadows, dark shapes, bottomless pits—nothing more.
The best horror masks hint at this abyssal identity—in the holes of the one worn by Jason, in the nondescript blankness of the one worn by Michael, in the crude flesh collage-work of those worn by Leatherface. But this chasm of self can’t be glimpsed directly. Our proto-being (the us before the mask) is literally unthinkable, since the very act of thinking it masks it. If there can be no being that is not being-in-the-world, then there can be no being that is not being-with-a-mask.
Even a face, as Agatha Christie knew, “is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.” Thus, what we find in the removal of a mask, or in the revelation of anything properly hidden, is that the occulted world—that worm-infested earth beneath the deceptive topsoil—will remain occulted even in its exposure. The horror is the removal of masks because that which is under the mask is always another mask.
Ironically, then, the mask is itself the most honest face, because the mask admits its falsity. Jason Voorhees doesn’t need the hockey mask in order to conceal who he is; he needs it in order to reveal who he is. Likewise, Michael Myers doesn’t wear his white featureless mask to hide his identity; he wears it to reveal his identity—and, more generally, to reveal the masquerade that is the concept of identity itself.
One of my favorite essays in the English language is “The Truth of Masks” by Oscar Wilde. In true mischievous Wildean fashion, the aesthete doesn’t use the word “masks” until the final line of the essay. His argument, put simply, is that Shakespeare paid close attention to the costuming of his plays, using dress as a means of producing certain dramatic effects. There is, according to Wilde, “no dramatist of the French, English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.” Yet after pages and pages arguing the importance of costumes in Shakespeare, the essay ends with the following sly admission:
‘Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realize Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.’
On the one hand, this coda is what it claims to be on the surface: a moment where Wilde walks back his argument, admits he doesn’t entirely agree with the essay he has just written, is contradictory, even with himself. Yet this contrariness, this romantic irony, also manages to further his argument, completing the logic: costumes are crucial in Shakespeare because the truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks, because meaning is surface, illusion, fiction.
“Every surface is a cloak,” Nietzsche knew. “Every word also a mask.”
Thus, to borrow the words of René Descartes, “Masked, I advance,” from word to word, sentence to sentence, thought to thought, identity to identity, being to being, shape to shape.
https://lithub.com/the-terror-behind-the-mask/?fbclid=IwAR2daTmxgfvOqvsm8ofUMGBYDR4bjIpwjVmOtNGYnfjYyh1gNQBujGsFegY
Yes, masks can conceal, and masks can reveal. Larvatus prodeo — "I proceed masked" — proved to be useful to me during the time I wrote a lot of persona poems.
One of the most unexpected findings about depression was that the depressed tend to use the first-personal personal pronouns more often than the non-depressed.
One tool of narrative psychotherapy is to write about yourself in the third person: to put on the mask of being someone else. Right away the narrative becomes less judgmental and more compassionate. When we write about ourselves in the third person, it feels like writing about a friend. We want to help her rather than put her down.
Masks are complicated. Designed to conceal, they can reveal. But the article also made me think of women who are forced to veil their faces — when in fact so much communication depends on our perception of the person's face.
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THE TWO SIDES OF MEDUSA
~ “It has been a long time, culturally speaking, since the “Spirit moved upon the face of the water” in Genesis, and the world was created by fiat and by division. That recorded the moment, some 1500 to 1200 years BCE, when the sky gods, over the deserts of the Middle East and the dry hills of Greece, usurped the old animal powers and established the dominion of detached mind over the older cyclical powers of the earth. Time, henceforth, was to be ruled from above, as by an absentee landlord.
It she be obvious from the story [of Medusa] that it retells the history of migration and invasion and of the overthrow of one religion by another: of the older, element gods — those of nature, of human subjugation to the serpent/chthonic powers of the earth and the cycles of seasonal time — by the immortal gods of Olympus, sky gods of intellect and will, sponsors of the new, tragic, heroes of human autonomy. It is one of those heroes, Perseus, who hunts Medusa to her lair at the horizon’s rim in that darkness where heavenly bodies vanish for rebirth; it is there we find the figure now, at the edge of the known, like a new sun rising so many centuries after these mythically mirrored events, and out of the dark sea of their consequences.
The second part of the story finishes the job of desecration/transformation through the agency of the hero, Perseus, child of the sunlight int he tower room,” who, aided by a shield, the gift of Athena, is able to fix the Medusa’s image its bright mirror, and so behead her without himself being transfixed. Out of her severed trunk — delivered in a perverse, matricidal birth — the air-borne Pegasus springs, his hoof opening the springs of artistic inspiration, reveling how this violent separation was felt as creatively energizing to the culture of that time.
Perseus, with Medusa’s head secured, goes on to play out the tale’s convention (one that would last, moralized and spiritualized, into the Christian Era): to slay a sea dragon, rescue a helpless maiden, and thereby inherit a kingdom. Power is the ultimate issue in these myths that mark a change of worlds, and of rulers.
And, as the divine analogue to this earthly reordering of powers, Athena took the severed but still dreadful head of Medusa and affixed it to the breastplate of her armor, taking over the ruined powers of her enemy, making nature and the lower world the captured emblem of her own chilly aegis.
It is worth noting, though, that it took centuries to complete the demonizing of this older form of the sacred. Though divided and conquered, the figure kept something of the contradictory nature of elemental powers: many classical (and neoclassical) images of Medusa’s head retained her beauty, along with her snakes; the legendary founder of Western medicine, the healer Asclepius, himself associated with a snake-entwined staff, surviving as the physician’s caduceus, was reputed to have used blood from her right side as a healing medicine, from her left as a poison.” ~ Eleanor Wilner, The Medusa Connection, Poets Teaching Poets
Benvenuto Cellini: Perseus with the head of Medusa, 1545Oriana:
I think this article is quite interesting: invasion and conquest, the old nature religion being supplanted by that of the sky gods, the unexpected appearance of Yahweh. But the old religion never goes away completely.
The Greek word “pharmakon” meant both a healing drug and poison. Both the old and the new religion had their beneficial effects and their toxic effects. It’s hard to think of anything that isn’t that way: the good and the bad all intertwined.
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“None of us—not one of us— lives without a myth or two and a mask or two.”
~ Tennessee Williams
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“It is necessary to fall in love— the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.” ~ Albert Camus
“The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” ~ Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams in Key West*
STRATEGIES PARENTS CAN USE INSTEAD OF YELLING AT THE KIDS
~ “Is it possible to raise children without shouting, scolding — or even talking to kids with an angry tone?
Step 1: Go Grandma Mode
The first step to no-yell parenting is to get a grip on your own anger, Inuit moms told us. As I've experienced, this is not always easy. But Veda Glover has a Jedi mind-trick that's helpful: "I consciously place my mindset into a grandmother role," says Glover, who's a Navajo bilingual teacher in Kirtland, New Mexico.
"When I first started teaching, I could feel my blood pressure rising when students wouldn't listen to me and follow directions," she says. "Then I came up with a question to ask myself in these situations: 'What would my own grandmother do?'
This strategy "helps me keep calm, and as a result helps my students understand that there is no need to yell nor become upset," says Glover.
Step 2: Learn To Give "The Look"
Instead of yelling or saying "No," try deploying a stern look, says teacher Vita Osborn.
Almost telepathically, my parents conveyed pages of information in a few short looks," she says. "One serious glance from my father or mother was enough to communicate that I was displeasing them in some way."
In traditional Inuit culture, some parents wrinkle their noses to convey "No" to a small child. But you can make "the look" with eyes wide open, eyes squinty or even a blink, as teacher Kristi McEwen's mom did.
Step 3: Put The Kids To Work
When a child misbehaves or makes a mistake, several readers suggested switching from being angry to being productive.
"Imagine the child knocks over a vase that belonged to your grandmother," says Terry Meredith. "Rather than get angry, I say 'Can you go get the broom so we can sweep up the pieces?' "
Then Meredith and her child work together to fix the mistake. "I ask 'Do you think we can glue the vase back together?' " she says. "Then the child is involved in cleanup and repair.”
June Shockley raised three sons with a similar strategy and says she had a "happy healthy home."
"I never grounded a child in my life," she says. "I would give an alternate activity."
For example, if her son was angry with about what's for dinner, Shockley would involve the child in meal prep by taking them grocery shopping and having them help cook the meal.
"That way our sons walked a mile in my shoes," Shockley says.
The method also tamed sibling anger.
"If one son hit his brother, I would say, 'We need more kindness in the world. Let's go to the animal shelter and clean the cages and give hugs and kisses to the puppies," Shockley explains.
Step 4: Bust Out Woofie
For young kids, sometimes all it takes is a little make-believe to get them to behave, says Kathryn Burnham.
"For example, if we're running late and my 3-year-old daughter needs to put on her shoes, I've learned that yelling or putting on the shoes myself makes things worse," says Kathryn Burnham. But when "Woofie" comes along, the shoes go on easy as pie.
"I make my hand into a dog by bringing [two of] my middle fingers down to my thumb for a mouth," Burnham says. She calls that hand dog "Woofie."
"Then I'll say something like 'Can Woofie have a turn trying to put on your shoes?' And I'll make silly whining, panting and barking dog sounds while Woofie helps her put on her shoes.
"The more animated I make Woofie, the more she giggles and loosens up," Burnham says. "With play, the tense situation has been turned into a fun bonding moment.”
For Penny Kronz's son, a stuffed animal often does the trick.
"When he doesn't want to join an activity, I just tell him it's time for his favorite stuffed animal to go to bed or come eat," Kronz says. "Then I proceed doing the activity with the stuffed animal, and he generally will quickly come join in."
At the end of day, sometimes mom and dad have to let go and let the pajamas take over the parenting, says Adele Karoly.
"When my son doesn't want to put on his pajamas, I will start having the pajamas talk to me," she says. "They will say something like, 'Elliot wants to wear us? And I will answer, 'I don't think he does, let me ask him.'
And if Elliot says "No?"
"I will tell the pajamas and continue to have a conversation with them," Karoly says. "Eventually, he will get drawn in and accept the pajamas, and they will be so excited and give him a big hug.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/04/20/708806109/disciplining-kids-without-yelling-readers-tell-us-their-tricks
Oriana:
Whatever works. I'm all for civility — kids who are yelled at learn that it’s OK to yell at others and otherwise behave like a bully.
The last part of this article is the most fun to read. Children’s problems become the parents’ creativity playground (e.g. the talking pajamas).
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CHRISTIANITY HAS TWO GREAT PROBLEMS: HEAVEN AND HELL
The problem with Christianity is not just hell, but also heaven. Always described vaguely at best (why? wasn’t that supposed to be the reward for sacrificing the good things in life?), Heaven seemed like a police state in the clouds, with nothing to do except sing praises as in unending church services. No food, no sex, no entertainment, certainly no dancing the tango; no songs except religious, no trees or birds, much less cats and dogs.
You get to see god — that was supposed to be the great thing, according to my catechism nun. But as children, we weren’t all that much interested in seeing the invisible old man in the sky become visible. That just wasn’t our idea of paradise — which, for a child and for most people, is always of the body. Later I could imagine a strictly mental paradise, but that would require books, movies, theater, lectures, intelligent friends to talk with — and some meaningful work.
In the end, nothing compares with life on earth. Depending on the circumstances and on your state of mind, that life can be heaven or hell or everything in between. Ah, but the beauty, the beauty . . .
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Heaven and hell are not the only problems with Christianity. The doctrine of vicarious communal salvation is repulsive to any modern person’s sense of justice. If an innocent man is knowingly executed instead of the guilty one — even if he volunteers for it — that’s a travesty of justice. But in order to have salvation, you have to posit innate ‘total depravity’ deserving of incredible eternal punishment in hell, and heaven as a carrot to go with the stick, so these concept are still at the root of trouble. To make things worse, depiction of the Christian heaven are not very appealing.
Tintoretto, Paradise (A friend said, "When I see a crowded image like that, I just turn away. I can't endure it.")*
Some letter of that Afterlife to spell;
And by and by my Soul returned to me,
And answered, “I Myself am Heaven and Hell” —
~ Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat
But heaven and hell not as places but as states of mind is not a new concept. Still, let’s take pleasure in the imaginative aspects of the quatrain: the sending of the Soul “through the Invisible” in order for the Soul to return able to spell at least “some letter of the Afterlife.”
Gustave Doré, Dante, ParadisoStates of mind, yes, but also certain places at a certain time. The geography of hell shifts depending on history. The heart of darkness used to be in the Belgian Congo; then it shifted to Auschwitz; now it’s Syria or Yemen. It’s human evil that creates that kind of hell, and that’s at least comprehensible to us. But then there is also the hell of natural disasters and the suffering of animals. There is a child born with a defective heart, and another that dies of brain cancer — there are hundreds of thousands of children dying slow, torturous deaths while their helpless parents stay up nights, nearly insane, some mouthing useless prayers.
At least we no longer say that either the child or one of the parents or both must have sinned. And yet I met a woman whose child died at a Catholic hospital due to a medical error, who was told by her nun-nurse: “The reason your baby died is because you had sex before marriage.”
But that was then. Now people seem to have more decency than to say such a thing.
Rather than try to shame the mother, they mostly shrug it off this kind of misfortune as the indifference of nature. But Milosz has a more intriguing answer.
WE HOPE TO SHAME GOD
“When we deny the existence of God on the grounds that no one who is good could have thought up a world in which living beings are subjected to such tortures, we treat our denial as an action that has the power to change something; in other words, we hope to shame God.” ~ Milosz
Milosz’s certificate of refugee, 1957Mary:
I often thought that the God we were supposed to believe in seemed small and petty in his requirements… less admirable than a good human being can be, and in that way, impossible to credit, much less worship.
Oriana:
“If god lived on earth, people would break his windows” ~ a Yiddish proverb. Even when I was a child — even during my most Catholic years — the biblical god struck me as evil rather than good. Jesus was mostly kind, but even he made a poor little fig tree wither for not bearing figs out of season — a minor incident considering that he was soon coming back, after the calamities of the End Days, to be the judge at the Last Judgment and throw most of the humans who ever lived — billions of them — into everlasting hell.
Someone noted that humanity has never managed to imagine an admirable god, giving us instead a monstrous, pouting toddler (or a “senile delinquent” as someone else commented).
To return to Milosz: it’s a bold, memorable phrase: “We hope to shame God.” Seeing the indignities of old age (urinary and fecal incontinence are relatively minor matters) and the miserable death that most people die, we want to shout at the Alleged Intelligent Designer, “Have you no decency left?” But it has always been only about power and constant praise — note the monotonous similarity among all the dictators in recorded history.
Milosz often points out that we've replaced god with nature, and nature is not kind by human standards. Even in the plant kingdom there is the strangler fig, say, and all kinds of parasites and diseases. And let's not forget that natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes) used to be called “acts of god” — still a legal term used chiefly by insurance companies.
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Mary: THE BODY IS THE NECESSARY GROUND FOR THE MIND
Much of this week's blog engages an essential question from different angles.
What is the nature of that abyss we dance over, inventing ourselves, dross matter and quicksilver mind? Begin with what the angels want — they envy us our bodies, and the one thing all bodies come to, but angels can’t — death. For all flesh is grass, temporary, embodied, defined in time and space, rich as all life can only be. Its sweetness is real because it cannot last, must end, decay and lose itself. Our bodies “soft with regret” define pleasure for us. Even the seemingly substanceless pleasures of the intellect arise from the abilities and limits of the physical — the configurations of proteins, the nerves’ avenues of sensation and reaction. There is nothing we can imagine better than life, and life is physical, material, temporal, mutable, subject to death and decay.
We envy angels' wings. And it's interesting that wings are very physical attributes, impossible in the way they are traditionally portrayed. The laws of physics would rule them out...they could not support a man-size body in flight. But wait. angels are not physical, but spiritual beings, they have no substance. And that is what makes them and their heaven so unappealing — they cannot die, but they are not truly living. Without substance, flesh, mutability, the capacity to change in time, they are essentially as inert and boring as stone. A heaven full of such sketchy beings has no flavor to compel desire.
What is interesting in this relates as well to the discussion of water and its peculiar properties, those that allow it, like no other liquid, the exact abilities to support life. The form of this simple two element substance is discovered to be a very particular geometric shape that links the molecules in a repeated and regular way. And it is this shape, this particular physical shape, that allows for and in fact determines the behavior of water.
Again, in the exploration of the placebo effect, what is discovered is the dynamic between learning and expectation (thoughts and feelings), and actual physical changes in the body, its chemistry and sensation. Feeling better is no substanceless illusion, but a result of physical changes such as the release of endorphins. This release is accomplished by our expectations from experience of taking medicine that helped in the past, as well as environmental cues from caretakers, and even expectations formed by ad campaigns, publicity, testimonials, etc. All this seemingly insubstantial stuff produces real, scientifically measurable change.
The metaphysical question appears to be answered here in that “dance over the abyss” — the continuous creative interplay between the physical and immaterial, flesh and mind, body and soul, being and nothingness. Without the flesh...well, there aren't any angels. The body is the necessary ground for consciousness, mind, identity, self. The discussion of masks takes this exploration farther, to how we create ourselves through an endless series of masks. Our identity is not given but forged in our play, staged by the frame of a life in a finite time, and particular place, giving it a narrative shape that creates and carries meaning.
The angels may well envy us this, our godlike power. played so bright and fierce against death’s shadow.
What all these things add up to, for me, is tremendous hope. Our unrelenting curiosity and invention, that can solve the riddles of water, its structure, its necessity, its scarcity, rivals the supposed powers of our old gods, rusty and useless, and in the way. Maybe we can find our own way through this mess without them.
Oriana:
Thank you, Mary, for this insightful summary. I am awed by how you managed to tie the opening poem to the properties of water, the paradox of masks, and the biological mechanisms of placebo. Yes, this is it: in some way, everything is based on the properties of matter, which we keep on discovering.
Take as an example the substance on which all of life depends: water. Sure, we were told in school that water expands as it freezes, that ice weighs less than the same volume of water — but why? Only now we’re beginning to get at the mystery of it.
Yes, the old gods are now in the way. Not that we should blame our ancestors for having invented the gods. They had colorful personalities and so much to do! Poseidon, for instance, “made waves” — when angry, he caused sea storms and earthquakes. In Athens, the worship of Poseidon was second only that of Athena. The “godlike Odysseus” was told that to propitiate the sea god he must travel again — this time on land, to an unknown country whose inhabitants know nothing about seafaring, and plant an oar there to establish the cult of Poseidon.
Poseidon was also blamed for certain types of epilepsy — the similarity of a seizure to an earthquake is obvious. In this particular blog, Poseidon appears earlier as the god who raped Medusa in the temple of Athena. These days he’s mostly the harmless shape adorning a multitude of fountains — but he should also remind us of the mostly cruel character of archaic religion. At bottom, as Nietzsche says, at the bottom the essence of religion is cruelty — not surprising, since religion is born of fear.
So our fragility and mortality both makes life supremely precious, and, at its negative extreme, results in absurdities and atrocities. Fortunately, as science and technology lead to more security — for instance, we won’t run out of energy or water if we take timely advantage of solar panels and desalinization plants. And security leads to no sense of need to grovel to imaginary deities, and more attention paid to developing the means to fulfill our human needs.
After sheer survival — again, the body as the substrate for everything else, even though for each person that battle must ultimately be lost — our greatest need appears to be to give and receive affection. One is never too old to love and be loved. George Bush’s last words were reported as “I love you too” — spoken after his son said, “I love you.”
We can use technology to produce an alienating, dehumanized environment — note, in my previous blog, my lament about the dehumanization of the hospitals, the computer chart’s priority over the actual patient — or we can use it to promote more security and human connection. I agree that the positive use of technology is the source of tremendous hope.
If there is another theme in this blog — in fact in most of my blogs — it’s that practically everything is both good and bad. Mary, you are so right: solving puzzles such as the mystery of water is a source of tremendous hope.It will take many brilliant minds working together to produce a better world — and it take many great souls, meaning people who understand essential human needs.
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“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” ~ (Anonymous)
BELIEF IS THE OLDEST MEDICINE: THE POWER OF THE PLACEBO EFFECT
~ “Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness.
In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared. If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it’s worth prescribing.
When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in 1996 reported pain reduction from a new drug compared to placebo. In 2013, it was 9 percent.
What this showed was not that the drugs were getting worse, but that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US, explains Jeffrey Mogil, the McGill University pain researcher who co-discovered the trend. And it’s not just growing stronger in pain medicine. Placebos are growing in strength in antidepressants and anti-psychotic studies as well.
“The placebo effect is the most interesting phenomenon in all of science,” Mogil says. “It’s at the precise interface of biology and psychology,” and is subject to everything from the drug ads we see to our interactions with health care providers to the length of a clinical trial.
Scientists have been studying this incredibly complex interface in great detail over the past 15 years, and they’re finding that sugar pills are stranger and more useful than we’ve previously imagined. The new science of placebo is bringing new understanding to why alternative treatments — like acupuncture and reiki — help some people. And it could also potentially allow us to one day prescribe smaller doses of pain drugs to help address the opioid crisis currently ravaging America.
Most instructively, the science finds that since we can’t separate a medicine from the placebo effect, shouldn’t we use it to our advantage?
For millennia, doctors, caregivers, and healers had known that sham treatments made for happy customers. Thomas Jefferson himself marveled at the genius behind the placebo. “One of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, powders of hickory ashes than of all other medicines put together,” Jefferson wrote in 1807. “It was certainly a pious fraud.”
These days, placebo — Latin for “I shall please” — is much more than a pious fraud.
As Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard, who is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on placebo, put it to me in one interview, the study of the placebo effect is about “finding out what is it that’s usually not paid attention to in medicine — the intangible that we often forget when we rely on good drugs and procedures. The placebo effect is a surrogate marker for everything that surrounds a pill. And that includes rituals, symbols, doctor-patient encounters.”
1) Regression to the mean
When people first go to a doctor or start on a clinical trial, their symptoms might be particularly bad (why else would they have sought treatment?). But in the natural course of an illness, symptoms may get better all on their own. In depression clinical studies, for instance, researchers find around one-third of patients get better without drugs or placebo. In other words, time itself is a kind of placebo that heals.
2) Confirmation bias
A patient may hope to get better when they’re in treatment, so they will change their focus. They’ll pay closer attention to signs that they’re getting better and ignore signs that they’re getting worse. (Relatedly, there’s the Hawthorne effect: We change our behavior when we know we’re being watched.)
But as we’ve seen, the placebo effect is more than just bias. There’s also:
3) Expectations and learning
The placebo response is something we learn via cause and effect. When we take an active drug, we often feel better. That’s a memory we revisit and recreate when on placebo.
Luana Colloca, a physician and researcher at University of Maryland, has conducted a number of studies on this phenomenon. And they typically go like this: She’ll often hook up a study participant to an electroshock machine. For each strong, painful shock, she’ll flash a red light on a screen the participant is looking at. For mild shocks, she’ll flash a green light. By the end of the experiment, when the participants see the green light, they feel less pain, even when the shocks are set to the highest setting.
The lesson: We get cues about how we should respond to pain — and medicine — from our environments.
Take morphine, a powerful drug that acts directly on neurochemical receptors in the brain. You can become addicted to it. But its analgesic powers grow when we know we’re taking it, and know a caring professional is giving it to us.
Studies show that post-operative patients whose painkillers are distributed by a hidden robot pump at an undisclosed time need twice as much drug to get the same pain-relieving effect as when the drug is injected by a nurse they could see. So awareness that you’re being given something that’s supposed to relieve pain seems to impact perception of it working.
The research also suggests that fake surgeries — where doctors make some incisions but don’t actually change anything — are an even stronger placebo than pills. A 2014 systematic review of surgery placebos found that the fake surgery led to improvements 75 percent of the time. In the case of surgeries to relieve pain, one meta-review found essentially no difference in outcomes between the real surgeries and the fake ones.
There is such thing as the nocebo effect: where negative expectations make people feel worse. Some researchers think this is what’s fueling the gluten-free diet fad. People have developed a negative expectation that eating gluten will make them feel bad. And so it does, even though they may not have any biological gluten sensitivity.
4) Pharmacological conditioning
Colloca has conducted many studies where for several days, a patient will be on a drug to combat pain or deal with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Then one day, she’ll surreptitiously switch the patient over to a placebo. And lo and behold, they still feel healing effects.
On that fifth day, it seems the placebo triggers a similar response in the brain as the real drug. “You can see brain locations associated with chronic pain and chronic psychiatric disease” acting like there are drugs in the system, she says. For instance, Colloca has found that individual neurons in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease will still respond to placebos as though they are actual anti-Parkinson’s drugs after such conditioning has taken place.
What’s going on here? Learning. Just like Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the sound of a bell with food and would start to salivate in anticipation, our brains learn to associate taking a pill with relief, and start to produce the brain chemicals to kick-start that relief.
This pharmacological conditioning only works if the drug is acting on a process that the brain can do naturally. “You can condition pain relief because there are endogenous pain-relieving mechanisms,” Miller says. Painkillers activate the opioid system in the brain.
Taking a pill you think is a painkiller can activate that system (to a lesser degree).
In a 2012 study, participants were given a sweet drink along with a pill that contained an immune suppressant drug for a few days. Without notice, the drug was swapped with placebo on one of the trial days. And their bodies still showed a decreased immune response. Their bodies had learned to associate the sweet drink with decreased production of interleukin, a key protein in our immune systems, which is produced in many cells outside the brain.
5) Social learning
When study participants see another patient get relief from a placebo treatment (like in the electroshock experiment described above), they have a greater placebo response when they’re hooked up to the machine.
6) A human connection
Irritable bowel syndrome is an incredibly hard condition to treat. People with it live with debilitating stomach cramps, and there are few effective treatments. And doctors aren’t sure of the underlying biological cause.
It’s the type of ailment that’s sometimes derided as “all in their head,” or a diagnosis given when all others fail. In the early 2000s, Harvard’s Ted Kaptchuk and colleagues conducted an experiment to see if usually intangible traits like warmth and empathy help make patients feel better.
In the experiment, 260 participants were split into three groups. One group received sham acupuncture from a practitioner who took extra time asking the patient about their life and struggles. He or she took pains to say things like, “I can understand how difficult IBS must be for you.” A second group got sham acupuncture from a practitioner who did minimal talking. A third group was just put on a waiting list for treatment.
The warm, friendly acupuncturist was able to produce better relief of symptoms. “These results indicate that such factors as warmth, empathy, duration of interaction, and the communication of positive expectation might indeed significantly affect clinical outcome,” the study concluded.
This may be the least-understood component of placebo: It’s not just about pills. It’s about the environment a pill is taken in. It’s about the person who gave it to you — and the rituals and encounters associated with them.
What placebos can, and can’t, do
Placebos seem to have the greatest power over symptoms that lie at the murky boundary between the physical and psychological.
A 2010 systematic review looked at 202 drug trials where a placebo group was compared to patients who received neither placebo nor active drug. And it found that placebos seem to move the needle on pain, nausea, asthma, and phobias, with more inconsistent results for outcomes like smoking, dementia, depression*, obesity, hypertension, insomnia, and anxiety. (*Separate literature review on depression meds does find an effect of placebo compared with no treatment.)
A 2011 study elegantly illustrates this. In the experiment, asthma patients were randomly sorted into three groups: One group received an inhaler with albuterol, a drug that opens the airways. Another group got an inhaler with a placebo. A third group got “sham” acupuncture (meaning the needles were withdrawn before they touched the skin). A fourth got nothing. The study authors evaluated lung function on two metrics: self-report from the patients on their asthma symptoms, and an objective measure of lung functioning.
If you go by self-report, it looks like the placebo, albuterol, and sham acupuncture are all equally effective. The objective measure, however, shows only the albuterol improved airflow.
Which isn’t to say that the self-reported improvement on placebo doesn’t matter. In many illnesses, patients would love a greater opportunity to ignore their symptoms.
“In all the objectively measurable illnesses, like cancer, even heart disease, there are components of it that are not [objectively measurable],” Kaptchuk says. And it’s those symptoms that are the prime targets to treat with placebo.
Over the past 15 years, scientists have made some of their most interesting discoveries looking at how placebos have a powerful impact on the brain.
Placebos, researchers have found, actually prompt the release of opioids and other endorphins (chemicals that reduce pain) in the brain. Other findings:
Drugs that negate the effects of opioids — such as naloxone — also counteract the placebo effect, which shows that placebos are indeed playing on the brain’s natural pain management circuitry.
The periaqueductal gray matter, a region of the brain key for pain management, shows increased activity under placebo. Regions of the spinal cord that respond to pain show decreased activity under placebo, which suggests either the sensation of pain or our perception of it is diminished under placebo.
Patients with Alzheimer’s disease start to show a diminished placebo response. It’s probably due to the degradation of their frontal lobes, the area of the brain that helps direct our subjective experience of the world.
Our understanding of all this is far from complete, Wager says. For one, researchers still don’t completely understand how the brain processes pain. A lot of the brain regions implicated in the placebo response also play a role in emotions. So we don’t yet know if placebo is actually reducing our sensation of pain, or just our interpretation of it.
You can tell people they’re taking a sugar pill for their illness, and they’ll still feel better
Kaptchuk has studied the placebo effect for decades, and something always bothered him: deception. Placebo studies have long relied on double-blind procedures. It ensures scientific rigor but keeps patients in the dark about what they’re actually taking.
“About five years ago, I said to myself, ‘I’m really tired [of] doing research that people say is about deception and tricking people,’” he says.
So he wanted to see: Could he induce a placebo response even when he told patients they were on placebo?
His own randomized controlled trials found that giving patients open-label placebos — sugar pills that the doctors admit are sugar pills — improved symptoms of certain chronic conditions that are among the hardest for doctors to treat, including irritable bowel syndrome and lower back pain. And he wonders if chronic fatigue — a hard-to-define, hard-to-treat, but still debilitating condition — will be a good future target for this research.
“Our patients tell us it’s nuts,” he says. “The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.”
Kaptchuk’s work adds a few new mysteries to the placebo effect. For one, he says that the placebo effect doesn’t require patient expectations for a positive outcome to work. “All my patients are people who have been to many doctors before. They don’t have positive expectations about getting better,” he says. “They’ve been to 10 doctors already.”
Colloca has a different interpretation of his results. She says there’s a difference between belief and expectation, so while the patients may not believe the pill will work, they still unconsciously expect it to.
That’s because, she says, they still have a deep-seated conditioned memory for what it means to take a pill. They have a conditioned memory for what it means to be in the care of another person. And that memory is indeed an expectation that can kick-start the analgesic effect in the brain. They don’t have to be aware it’s happening.
The researchers I spoke to for this story are overall optimistic that these discoveries can be used in the clinical settings. There’s a lot of work left to do here, and certainly some of the findings are easier to implement than others. For instance, we could start with reminding doctors that they can relieve pain simply by being warm and caring to their patients.
The NIH’s Miller says it’s too soon to start prescribing placebos, or using the effect, to decrease the dosage of a drug. For one, most of these studies are short-term and conducted with healthy volunteers, not actual patients.
“There’s still lot we don’t know,” he says. Like side effects: Just as a placebo can mimic a drug, it can also mimic a side effect. “We haven’t done the kinds of studies that will indicate that you can maintain therapeutic benefit at lower side effect burden.”
More broadly, Kaptchuk says, for years researchers have seen the placebo as a hurdle to clear to produce good medicine. But placebo is not just a hurdle. “It’s basically the water that medicine swims in,” he says. “I would like to see the bottom line of my research change the art of medicine into the science of medicine.”
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AUTUMN JUSTICE
Gray-haired lovers walk under everlasting trees
down a path littered with the the crunchy
fingers of the gods and Caesars.
~ Zbigniew Herbert (tr Oriana Ivy)
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