Luca Pacioli (1445–1517) with a student (Guidobaldo da Montefeltro?) / Attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari. Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli (sometimes Paccioli or Paciolo; c. 1447 – 19 June 1517) was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and an early contributor to the field now known as accounting.
*
COUNTRY HOUSE
maybe belonging to a great aunt:
her sepia shoulders, a velvet ribbon,
a cameo of my face before I was born
here on a gilded summer slope.
Lace breathes in the tall windows.
The verandah whispers Stay.
It’s the house of time:
an afternoon made of all afternoons,
a gold-leaf couple like a storied song,
and look: shimmering in the air,
the young couple they once were.
A bridal bouquet
brims the vase on the piano.
It’s my house and everyone’s,
my youth and the harvest
of old age yet to come. I stroke
the railing, I caress
the generations like a swirl of wood —
then remember that slip-by,
slip-of-tongue young girl who sold
her birthright for a different song.
Why didn’t you warn me, great aunt?
I slid down your sloped ribbon
out of place, out of time.
And look: I am no one,
in a language not mine
singing in an unknown country.
~ Oriana
Mary:
The sadness in the poem, that lost "Country House" which is the house of a lost country, that "house of time" is one we all regret, even if we have not abandoned it, sold our birthright for another song. Time itself is the ever increasing distance between us and the world of those past generations, we are all refugees from that idyllic first world of our birth. Even if we still speak its language, we sing in the unknown country of the future.
I do not discount the particular loneliness of the immigrant, forever feeling away from home and all that is blessedly familiar, but feel in some way we are all immigrants away from home, that homesickness is part of our universal experience as adults, and perhaps something that is felt even more as we grow older, closer to the age of the generation before us, as we remember they were when we were young.
Oriana:
The longer I live, the more I feel I'm not so much an immigrant from another country but rather than immigrant in time, now an alien in the country of the young. I guess there is no escaping some kind of estrangement. It used to bother me that my peers often said, “We are all immigrants.” Now I feel that yes, they are right. There are shades and degrees of the term, but time is relentless and ultimately disowns everyone.
*
BETWEEN SOLITUDE AND LONELINESS
BY DONALD HALL
At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975, Kate died at ninety-seven, and I took over.
Forty-odd years later, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the horse. I look at a tulip; I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair, I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. I also watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the enormous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I refuse them, preserving my continuous silence. Linda comes two nights a week. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week, Carole does my laundry and counts my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves.
Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.
Born in 1928, I was an only child. During the Great Depression, there were many of us, and Spring Glen Elementary School was eight grades of children without siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later, I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade, there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety.
Most of the time, I liked staying alone after school, sitting in the shadowy living room. My mother was shopping or playing bridge with friends; my father added figures in his office; I daydreamed.
In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather, on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holsteins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich—a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. I’ve told of this sandwich before.
At fifteen, I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I hated it—five hundred identical boys living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night, the rest of the school sat in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.
At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years, I lived in one bedroom crowded with everything I owned. During my senior year, I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At Oxford, I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife–people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three–I settled in Ann Arbor, teaching English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or reading aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room, working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.
After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.
For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t.
Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.
For almost twenty years, I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was the second floor in the rear, beside Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning. We had lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without speaking to each other. Afterward, we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.
For several hours afterward, I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon, I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, more Henry James, seventeenth-century poets. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a delicious dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom-and-garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from the bed across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we talked about our separate days.
Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond, on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun, tanning, while I read books in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then, we would dive into the pond. Sometimes, for an early supper, we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty years of our remarkable marriage, living and writing together in double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven, on April 22, 1995.
Now it is April 22, 2016, and Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year, at eighty-seven, I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. I was sick and thought I was dying. Every day of her dying, I stayed by her side—a year and a half. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last January I grieved again, this time that she would not sit beside me as I died. ~
(The New Yorker, October 15, 2016)
Nathan Oliveira (American, 1928-2010): Couple with Light, 2003
Oriana:
To me this essay is not about solitude in itself. It's more about solitary work and having the luxury of time for oneself — but with the fabulous gift of having the right person in your life
— yes, someone who will sit with you when you are dying.
Solitude is supremely important; without it no creative work can be done. But most essays on solitude protest too much, keeping silent on the longing for that one person who truly cares, who is there for us.
Donald Hall died in 2018, 3 months short of turning ninety, at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire — the old farm that he and Jane loved.
When the balance of solitude and companionship is right, a feeling of calm gratitude follows. We feel at home in the world:
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
~ Jane Kenyon. Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
I love “our steps / made black holes in the grass.” It’s dark enough for the stepped-on grass to look that way. And when life feels right, you notice those small but rich gifts: the grass at night, the pear tree.
*
John Guzlowski:
He was a friend of a friend and came to visit him in the small town we lived in in central Illinois. Hall was quiet, reserved mostly, but when he read his poems, all his life and all his emotions were in his hands and he was holding them out to you.
Oriana:
People who require lots of solitude tend to be emotionally very intense. And that shows when later they communicate with those who are receptive to them.
Mary:
Those who do not know its comforts can mistake solitude for loneliness. The daily schedule Donald Hall describes sounds idyllic to me, but to many, I am sure, despite the "daily fuck,” it would seem bare and monastic. Not, however, to anyone with creative work at the center of their lives. And I agree that he speaks from the fortunate position of having had a partner also dedicated to that creative work, so that they were both privileged to ample space and time for solitude and the bulwark of their relationship, operating in a perfect sort of tandem. The tragedy of Jane's early death is ironic as they hesitated on marriage, assuming the disparity in their ages would condemn Jane to a long widowhood. Instead it was Donald who survived 20 years past her death, to face his own without her.
Growing up I chased solitude with determination and inventiveness. Surrounded by many siblings and living in a place open to the public seven days a week (my Grandmother's tavern), I craved any bit of empty space and time I could find. That was my paradise and heart's desire, being alone and undisturbed with a book for as long as I could. I was my own best companion. There was no loneliness, only entertainment, curiosity and invention. I was never one of those children endlessly complaining of boredom...something truly foreign to me to this day.
Oriana:
Likewise. At first America and loneliness were synonyms to me. Later I realized that if I had stayed in Poland, it would have been harder to get the solitude I needed. Solitude is a luxury.
*
There is no doubt as to which category Nietzsche placed himself in
*
Here is an introvert’s statement on aging:
As you grow old you lose interest in sex, your friends drift away and your children often ignore you. There are other advantages, of course, but these are the outstanding ones. ~ Richard Needham
Oriana:
There is greater autonomy and freedom. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the learning of new skills, be it making a mosaic or some small practical skill that enhances housekeeping, cooking, or gardening, is immensely satisfying. And there are marvelous books to re-read, and, for me, old poems to return to and now and then polish to perfection.
A few friendships, even if only by correspondence, are a necessity, I think. Friends who drift away are those with whom you no longer share much — losing them isn’t much of a loss, but rather a gain of more time for true friendships. Also, mysteriously, certain people seem to come into my life, chiefly by correspondence, just when I need them. Then they drift away, but that feels just right too.
And chatting with neighbors is essential as well — not only because you may need their help, but simply as part of being human, greeting them warmly, showing concern for their well-being.
*
THE BATMAN EFFECT: HOW CREATING A FICTIONAL PERSONA CAN EMPOWER YOU
~ How do the world’s top stars muster the poise and determination to stand on stage, despite the nerves and anxiety of having a bad performance? For both Beyoncé and Adele, the secret has been the creation of an alter ego.
Beyoncé’s was the assertive and empowered ‘Sasha Fierce’, who allowed her to perform with extra self-confidence and sensuality. “Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2008. It was a strategy that she continued to use until 2010, when she felt she had matured enough to avoid the psychological crutch.
Inspired by an emotional meeting with Beyoncé herself, Adele followed suit, telling Rolling Stone magazine in 2011 about her creation of ‘Sasha Carter’. The persona was a combination of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce persona and the (real) country music star June Carter. Adele said the strategy helped her give her best to every performance during her breakout year.
Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.
“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.
Shifting perspective
Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has led much of this research over the past decade, showing that even small shifts in perspective can help people to gain control of their emotions.
In one study, participants were asked to think about a challenging event in the future, such as an important exam, in one of two different ways. The group in the “immersed” condition were told to picture it from the inside, as if they were in the middle of the situation, whereas those in the “distanced” condition were asked to picture it from afar – as if they were a fly on the wall. The differences were striking, with those taking the distanced viewpoint feeling much less anxious about the event, compared to the immersed group. The self-distancing also encouraged greater feelings of self-efficacy – the sense that they could pro-actively cope with the situation and achieve their goal.
In other experiments, participants were asked to give a small public talk. Beforehand, they were advised to think through their emotions about the challenge using the third person (“David feels…”) as if they were a separate entity, rather than the more immersive first person (“I feel”). Like the distanced visualization, this advice was designed to encourage the person to see the situation from an outside perspective.
Once again, the creation of the psychological distance helped the participants to master their anxiety, reducing both their subjective ratings of the emotion and objective measures, such as the changes in heart rate and blood pressure that usually accompany threatening events. And those feelings of greater confidence were reflected in the quality of the presentation itself, according to the judgement of independent observers asked to rate their performance.
The eye on the prize
Self-distancing seems to enable people to reap these positive effects by leading them to focus on the bigger picture – it’s possible to see events as part of a broader plan rather than getting bogged down in immediate feelings. And this has led some researchers to wonder whether it could also improve elements of self-control like determination, by making sure that we keep focused on our goals even in the face of distraction.
Along these lines, one experiment asked whether people were better able to focus on difficult word puzzles if they had been asked to practice self-distancing before the test. In this case, they were asked to give advice to themselves in the second-person – “You will concentrate on each question” – as if they were talking to a friend, rather than themselves. Besides improving overall performance, the effects could also be seen in questionnaires measuring their attitudes to the task, which revealed a stronger intention to improve their performance.
By boosting their sense of self control, self-distancing can also improve people’s health behavior. It can increase people’s intentions to exercise, for instance, and helps them to resist the temptation of junk food. This is no mean feat. “Few self-control strategies to date have successfully improved eating outcomes,” says Celina Furman, a social psychology researcher at the University of Minnesota.
Working with Kross, Furman recently asked participants to practice self-distancing as they were faced with the choice of various kinds of food – fruit compared to candy, for example. When participants had practiced self-distancing (asking “What does David want?”, for example, rather than “What do I want?) they were more likely to choose the healthier option.
Although further studies will be needed to test the long-term benefits of the approach, Furman thinks that it could be incorporated into a variety of different weight-loss schemes. “The ease of distanced self-talk does offer exciting potential applications,” she says. It could be incorporated into mobile apps, for instance, with notifications that prompt you to think in the third person as you plan your meals.
The ‘Batman Effect’
The possibility that self-distancing could increase willpower is particularly exciting for child psychologists, given that self-discipline is thought to be as important for academic performance as IQ.
A few years ago, assistant psychology professor White took a group of six-year-olds and set them a test of concentration on a computer, in which a series of images flashed and they had to press the space bar whenever they saw a picture of cheese. The task was designed to be rather boring, but the children were told that it was “a very important activity” and that they would be a “good helper” if they worked on the task for as long as possible – increasing their motivation to persevere. As a potential distraction, the researchers also left them with an iPad, with a much more fun game designed to lure them away.
Beforehand, the children were told that it could sometimes be helpful to think about their feelings, if the task got too boring. Some were told to think “Am I working hard?” while others were encouraged to think in the third-person (“Is Hannah working hard?”). A third group were given the option to change persona entirely by inhabiting the role of their favorite fictional hero, such as Batman or Dora the Explorer. They were even given props to dress up, and when they got bored, they were told to consider their behavior as if they were the actual character, asking, for instance, “Is Batman working hard?”
The researchers had suspected that the alter ego would be a more extreme form of self-distancing, and the results showed exactly that. While the children thinking in the third person spent about 10% more of the total available time on the task that those thinking in the first person, it was the children inhabiting their alter egos who stuck it out for the longest of all. Overall, they spent 13% more of the total available time on the task than those thinking in the third person (and 23% more than those thinking about their behavior in the first person).
White has also found that adopting an alter ego can also help children to concentrate on a complex card game, in which they had to follow complex rules that kept on changing. Once again, “the Batman effect” seemed to have increased their resolve and concentration, improving their “executive function.”
While these were laboratory experiments, White hopes that this small exercise might ease many situations that require self-control. The test of perseverance, after all, was already very close to the kind of decisions that children might face when doing their homework with the potential temptation of the TV or cell phone. She thinks it may also be useful to avoid feeling dispirited during new challenges. “Pretending to be someone who's more competent, and getting that distance from the situation, could help them to overcome the frustration they're feeling when they're learning something new.”
What would Beyoncé do?
Given these findings and the benefits of self-distancing more generally, White suspects that we could all boost our emotional regulation, self-control and general poise by choosing to embody another persona à la Sasha Fierce.
After all, certain religious initiatives already encourage this kind of thinking, she says. “When I was growing up in the ‘90s, there were all these bracelets that said, ‘WWJD’ – What would Jesus do?” she says. “So, I think it’s a pretty intuitive concept to a lot of people.”
If you want to try it yourself, White suggests picking a different person for different types of goals – maybe a wise member of your family for a personal dilemma, or a work mentor for a professional problem. “When I was a postdoc, we had a little saying in our lab that if you're an undergrad, pretend to be a grad student. If you are a grad student, pretend to be a postdoc, and if you're a postdoc, pretend to be the leader of the lab – just to get you to that next level,” she says.
Whatever persona we choose, the practice should create some psychological space away from potentially distracting feelings, while also reminding us of the behaviors we want to emulate. Whether we’re placing ourselves in the shoes of a friend, a religious figure, or Beyoncé herself, a little imagination might put us all a little closer to the person we wish to become. ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200817-the-batman-effect-how-having-an-alter-ego-empowers-you?utm_source=pocket-newtab
This reminds me of the various studies that found a benefit in speaking about yourself in the third person, as well as the somewhat related studies that discovered a link between depression and the frequent use of the first person pronouns. A depressed person can indeed descend into incredible self-centeredness — and all the statements revolving around the self are negative.
I suspect that women in particular need to learn the third person technique. Once they manage to step outside themselves, they become nurturing toward toward the “friend” who is trying to cope with a problem. If they remain immersed in themselves, they may be defeated by their inner critic. Typically they grew up being criticized rather than feeling valued, socialized to be a “service person” rather than an independent agent (yes, I know that things are changing, but just their smaller size has a certain inhibitory effect).
During my miserable but also highly transformative twenties, I discovered Sylvia Plath. In one of her bee-keeping poems, Plath says: “I have a self to recover, a queen.” The words burned themselves into my psyche.
**
Mary:
The empowering effect of self-distancing, shifting perspective a step outside the self, makes wonderful sense. I have known people caught in terribly destructive patterns of thought and behavior, and noted how frequently they use "I" and "me" in their speech. Once you notice this it becomes impossible to ignore. It is like a signature for their misery, whatever shape that may take.
If you can take that step outside the "I", it can be liberating, it can break the habit of whatever destructive pattern you are caught up in...Beyonce and Batman find confidence and the ability to perform, but perspective may also gift you with the ability to laugh, to see the ridiculous in your negative habits of thought, the self delusion in your assumptions about your own worthiness (or worthlessness), the futility of repeating the same failing strategies over and over. I believe that shift in perspective is one of the main advantages of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Oriana:
Yes, yes, and yes. And it’s wonderful how cognitive therapy. when successful, rewires the brain. Words can actually change neural pathways — it’s so wonderful to know.
*
CAN WE SURVIVE EXTREME HEAT?
~ On a scorching day in downtown Phoenix, when the temperature soars to 115°F or higher, heat becomes a lethal force. Sunshine assaults you, forcing you to seek cover. The air feels solid, a hazy, ozone-soaked curtain of heat. You feel it radiating up from the parking lot through your shoes. Metal bus stops become convection ovens. Flights may be delayed at Sky Harbor International Airport because the planes can’t get enough lift in the thin, hot air. At City Hall, where the entrance to the building is emblazoned with a giant metallic emblem of the sun, workers eat lunch in the lobby rather than trek through the heat to nearby restaurants. On the outskirts of the city, power lines sag and buzz, overloaded with electrons as the demand for air conditioning soars and the entire grid is pushed to the limit.
In an Arizona heat wave, electricity is not a convenience, it is a tool for survival.
Still, the multiplying risks of extreme heat are just beginning to be understood, even in places like Phoenix, one of the hottest big cities in America. To Mikhail Chester, the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, the risk of a heat-driven catastrophe increases every year. “What will the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat look like?” he wonders aloud as we sit in a cafe near the ASU campus.
In Chester’s view, a Phoenix heat catastrophe begins with a blackout. It could be triggered any number of ways. During periods of extreme heat, power demand surges, straining the system. Inevitably, something will fail. A wildfire will knock out a power line. A substation will blow. A hacker might crash the grid. In 2011, a utility worker doing routine maintenance near Yuma knocked out a 500-kilovolt power line that shut off power to millions of people for up to 12 hours, including virtually the entire city of San Diego, causing economic losses of $100 million. A major blackout in Phoenix could easily cost much more, says Chester.
But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, energy-efficient buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps.) Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If a blackout during extreme heat continues for long, rioting, looting, and arson could begin.
And people will start dying. How many? “Katrina-like numbers,” Chester predicts. Which is to say, thousands. Chester describes all this coolly, as if a Phoenix heat apocalypse is a matter of fact, not hypothesis. “It’s more a question of when,” Chester says, “not if.”
*
Heat waves are driven not just by rising temperatures but by a change in the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system. As the atmosphere warms, the temperature difference between the poles and the subtropics is shrinking, which is changing the path of the jet stream, the big river of wind 35,000 feet up in the sky that drives our weather system. The jet stream’s path is shaped by atmospheric waves called Rossby waves, which are created naturally as the Earth spins. Mann explains that as the Earth’s temperature gradient flattens, the Rossby waves tend to bend, resulting in a curvy jet stream that is more likely to get “stuck,” trapping weather systems in place and creating what Mann calls “huge heat domes.”
Extreme heat is already transforming our world in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Disney executives recently voiced concern that rising temperatures will significantly reduce the number of visits to their parks. In Germany, officials were forced to put a speed limit on the autobahn because of fears the road would buckle from heat. The U.S. military has already incurred as much as $1 billion in costs during the past decade — from lost work, retraining, and medical care — due to the health impacts of heat. The warming of the planet “will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security,” a recent DOD report said.
Forests and soils are drying out, contributing to explosive and unprecedented wildfires. Habitation zones for plants and animals are changing, forcing them to adapt to a warmer world or die. A U.N. report found that 1 million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades. Another study by researchers at MIT suggests that rising temperatures and humidity may make much of South Asia, including parts of India and Pakistan, too hot for human existence by the end of the century. As scientist Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute in California, told me, “There is a shocking, unreported, fundamental change coming to the habitability of many parts of the planet, including the USA.”
But warming is not happening at the same rate everywhere. The Arctic, for example, is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Why? It’s a classic climate feedback loop: Ice and snow are highly reflective, bouncing sunlight back into space. But as the region warms, sea and land ice declines, exposing more open land and ocean, which are darker and absorb more heat. As temperatures rise, the permafrost melts, which releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which further accelerates the melting.
Greenland is in the midst of one of the biggest melt seasons ever recorded, with temperatures as much as 40°F above normal. And as the Arctic heats up and dries out, it burns. There were unprecedented wildfires in 2019, with more than 100 massive fires raging across the region since June. The burning peat has already emitted more than 100 million tons of greenhouse gases (nearly the annual carbon emissions of Belgium), further accelerating the climate feedback cycle that’s cooking the planet.
But the greatest risk to human health may be in areas that are already hot, where temperature increases will strain habitability. In the U.S., the fastest-warming cities are in the Southwest. Las Vegas, El Paso, Tucson, and Phoenix have warmed the most, each by at least 4.3°F since 1970. Globally, many of the hottest cities are in India. In May, a deadly heat wave sent temperatures above 120°F in the north. The desert city of Churu recorded a high of 123°F, nearly breaking India’s record of 123.8°F, set in 2016. There were warnings not to go outside after 11 a.m. Authorities poured water on roads to keep them from melting. A 33-year-old man was reportedly beaten to death in a fight over water. The preliminary death toll in India for this summer’s heat wave is already more than 200, and that number is likely to grow.
Unless nations of the world take dramatic action soon, we are headed for a warming of at least 5.4°F (3°C) by the end of the century, making the Earth roughly as warm as it was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene era, long before Homo sapiens came along. “Human beings have literally never lived on a planet as hot as it is today,” says Wehner. A 5.4°F-warmer world would be radically different from the one we know now, with cities swamped by rising seas and epic droughts turning rainforests into deserts.
The increased heat alone would kill significant numbers of people. A recent report from the University of Bristol estimated that with 5.4°F of warming, about 5,800 people could die each year in New York due to the heat, 2,500 could die in Los Angeles, and 2,300 in Miami. “The relationship between heat and mortality is clear,” Eunice Lo, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol and the lead author of the report, tells me. “The warmer the world becomes, the more people die.”
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Not surprisingly, heat regulation is one of the body’s most important functions. One way to think about the human body is as a giant multicellular heat engine that strives to maintain a constant internal state of 98.6°F. The very process of living — of eating, breathing, moving, thinking, having sex — generates heat. The outside air is usually lower than 98.6°F, so our bodies release heat, mostly by circulating blood to capillaries close to the surface of our skin, where the heat can be dissipated (that’s why your body is warm to the touch). Without a cooling mechanism, just our basic metabolism would result in about a 2°F hourly rise in body temperature. We wouldn’t even make it through the day.
If the equilibrium between body temperature and the outside world gets too far out of whack, the body quickly deploys its only emergency heat-release system: It sweats. For sweating to be effective, however, the water has to evaporate. High humidity is uncomfortable (and potentially deadly) because the air, already filled with water, has little capacity to add more, so the sweat simply sits on the surface.
The loss of water through sweat is itself a health hazard. The average person contains roughly 40 liters of fluid. On a hot day, when the body is struggling to keep from overheating, a person can easily lose a liter of sweat per hour. When the body is down one liter, basic functions are impaired. When it’s down five, fatigue and dizziness set in. Ten liters disturbs hearing and vision and you will likely collapse — a condition known as heat stress.
But if it’s hot and humid enough, even drinking plenty of water won’t help. As the body’s temperature rises, it tries to cool itself by pumping more and more blood to capillaries under the skin. The heart pumps faster, the chest pounds, the pulse races. As the body loses water, our blood becomes thicker and harder to propel. When the body temperature hits 103°F or so, the metabolism will be running flat out in an emergency effort to dump heat. Eventually, the most vital organs can’t keep up, and the body’s neurological system begins to collapse. At 105°F, the body is in serious trouble. The brain swells, often causing hallucinations and convulsions. Pupils become dilated and fixed. Sweating stops, and the skin feels hot and dry to the touch. At that point, if the body temperature isn’t lowered immediately by emergency cooling measures such as being packed in ice or a plunge into cold water, the person could die of heatstroke.
The psychological impacts of extreme heat are obvious to anyone who’s ever felt cranky on a hot day. But the impacts go beyond crankiness. When temperatures rise, suicide rates can go up at a pace similar to the impact of economic recessions. Some aspects of higher cognition are impaired. School test scores decline, with one study showing decreases across five measures of cognitive function, including reaction times and working memory.
The link between heat and violence is particularly intriguing. “There is growing evidence of a psychological mechanism that is impacted by heat, although we can’t yet say exactly what that is,” says Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at Berkeley. Some scientists speculate that higher temperatures impact neurotransmitters in the brain, resulting in lower levels of serotonin, which has been shown to lead to aggressive behavior. So rising heat may literally alter the chemistry in our brains. One study showed that police officers were more likely to fire on intruders during training exercises when it was hot. Andrew Shaver, a professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, analyzed data about conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and found that attacks by insurgents involving RPGs and assault rifles increased with higher temperatures, while planned attacks did not. “During conflicts, higher temperatures seem to provoke more impulsive aggression,” Shaver says.
Re-engineering a city like Phoenix for extreme heat is a long-term project that has only just begun, says David Hondula, a senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University. “Think about places like Minnesota, and what they have done to engineer for cold winters,” Hondula says. “They have tunnels you walk through in the winter, the heating systems are optimized, you drive cars with snow tires and all-wheel drive. We have done nothing like that in Phoenix, or in any city, really, when it comes to thinking about heat. The whole idea of engineering for extreme heat is still in its infancy.”
Retrofitting Phoenix — including reining in suburban sprawl, revising building codes to improve energy efficiency and ventilation, and creating greener urban spaces — is certainly imaginable, but “if we are going to be serious about this, a big investment is required,” Hondula says. “We need billions of dollars.”
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As the world heats up, cities will get the worst of it. They are built of concrete and asphalt and steel, materials that absorb and amplify heat during the day, then radiate it out at night. Air conditioners blow out hot air, exacerbating the problem of urban heat buildup. Downtown Phoenix, for example, can be as much as 21°F hotter than the surrounding area. This phenomenon, which is called Urban Heat Island Effect, impacts most cities in the world. On average, cities are 2 to 5°F warmer than their leafy suburbs during the day — and as much as 22°F warmer during some evenings. The effect is so pervasive that some climate skeptics have seriously claimed that global warming is merely an illusion created by thousands of once-rural meteorological stations becoming surrounded by urban development.
Counterintuitively, the biggest health effects of rising heat often occur at night, when vulnerable people such as the elderly badly need the chance to cool down. Without that chance, they can succumb to heatstroke, dehydration, and heart attacks. This appears to be what happened during the heat wave that hit Europe in 2003, killing 70,000 people, mostly in buildings without air conditioning. Research has shown that the cause of many deaths was not so much the 104°F daytime temperatures, but the fact that nights stayed in the seventies or higher.
To reduce the heat-absorbing impacts of urban areas, some cities are experimenting with white roofs. The idea is to change the reflectivity of the rooftop to bounce more light off so that the building absorbs less heat. New York, for instance, introduced rules on white roofs into its building codes as long ago as 2012. Volunteers and workers have taken white paint to 10 million square feet of roofs in the city, though that is still less than one percent of New York’s total roof area.
Keith Oleson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, looked at what might happen if every roof in large cities around the world were painted white. He found it could decrease the Urban Heat Island Effect by a third — enough to reduce the maximum daytime temperatures by about 1°F, and even more in hot, sunny regions such as the Arabian Peninsula and Brazil.
Other places, such as Stuttgart, Germany, are trying to re-engineer the airflow of the whole city. Stuttgart is an industrial town surrounded by steep hills at the bottom of a river valley, where heat and polluted air linger. To help cool things off, city planners have built a number of wide, tree-flanked arterial roads that work as ventilation corridors and help clean, cool air flow down from the hills. Officials have also restricted new buildings from going up on certain hillsides in order to keep the air moving.
Many urban centers are trying to combat heat the old-fashioned way: by planting shade trees. Since 2011, Louisville, Kentucky, has planted about 100,000 trees. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has plans to create “urban forests” in the center of the city. In May, I visited Singapore, a tropical city that is far more densely developed than Phoenix. It’s hard to find a single inch of Singapore that is in any way “natural,” but since the 1960s, there has been a deliberate government-led effort to green the city. The highways are canopied with lush trees, urban parks have been expanded, and thousands of sidewalk trees have been planted. Wandering downtown, I felt like I was in a jungle, there were so many vines and plants hanging from windows.
“There used to be a lot of nice big shade trees in Phoenix, but they cut them all down in the 1960s because they were worried about how much water they used,” Mark Hartman, Phoenix’s chief sustainability officer, says with a bit of an eye roll. (In fact, climate-appropriate trees like mesquite or ash only require extra water for the first year or two after they’re planted — when they get bigger, the increased shade often increases soil moisture by reducing evaporation.) In 2010, as the problems of extreme heat became more obvious, Phoenix officials set a goal of doubling the percentage of the city covered with tree canopy from 12 to 25 percent. Then came the inevitable budget cuts and layoffs after the recession. According to Hartman, “Tree planting was cut back to stay only slightly ahead of those lost to storms and drought.” Today, the tree-canopy cover in Phoenix remains virtually unchanged from what it was a decade ago.
In research labs around the country, you can find experiments with walls engineered to suck heat out of buildings, and wood that’s altered to be stronger, cooler, and better for insulation. But right now, the only technology deployed at scale against extreme heat is air conditioning. Nearly 90 percent of the homes in America have it — it’s as necessary as running water and a toilet.
Without air conditioning, the world as we know it today wouldn’t exist. It’s inconceivable that there would be a city of 4.5 million people living in the middle of the Southwestern desert — much less 20 million people living in Florida — without air conditioning. After World War II, Americans flocked from chilly Northern states to sunny Southern states. It was one of the great demographic shifts of the 20th century, and it precisely mirrored the proliferation of air conditioners. “Air conditioning was essential to the development of the Sun Belt,” historian Gary Mormino has argued. “It was unquestionably the most significant factor.”
Air conditioning is one of those paradoxical modern technologies that creates just as many problems as it solves. For one thing, it requires a lot of energy, most of which comes from fossil fuels. AC and fans already account for 10 percent of the world’s energy consumption. Globally, the number of air-conditioning units is expected to quadruple by 2050. Even accounting for modest growth in renewable power, the carbon emissions from all this new AC would result in a more than 0.9°F increase in global temperature by the year 2100.
Cheap air conditioning is like crack cocaine for modern civilization, keeping us addicted and putting off serious thinking about more creative (and less fossil-fuel-intensive) solutions. Air conditioning also creates a kind of extreme heat apartheid. If you’re rich, you have a big house with enough air conditioning to chill a martini. And if you are poor, like Leonor Juarez, a 46-year-old single mother whom I met on an afternoon in July when the temperature was hovering around 115°F, you live in South Phoenix, where sidewalks are dirt and trees are few, and you hope you can squeeze enough money out of your paycheck to run the AC for a few hours on hot summer nights.
Juarez turns on her AC only a few hours a day — still, her electric bill can run $500 a month during the summer, which is more than she pays for rent. To Juarez, who takes a bus five miles to a laundromat in the middle of the night because washing machines are discounted to 50 cents a load after 1 a.m., $500 is a tremendous amount of money.
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Heat deaths also raise larger questions about the future of cities like Phoenix. As temperatures soar in the coming years, the real question is not whether superheated cities are sustainable. With enough money and engineering skill, you can sustain life on Mars. The issue is, sustainable for whom?
Heat is not an equal-opportunity killer. If you’re poor, sick, old, or homeless, you’re more likely to die during a heat wave. Recent immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are particularly at risk. A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that immigrants are three times more likely than citizens to die from heat-related illnesses. More than 85 percent of non-U.S. citizens who died from heat-related causes were Hispanic. Researchers hypothesized that working outdoors and in agriculture increased vulnerability.
Still, the worst of the summer heat hadn’t arrived yet, and as the temperatures rise in Phoenix and cities around the world, superheated by the civilized world’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, there are so many deaths to come.
(this article goes back to 2019)
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/can-we-survive-extreme-heat?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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WHY DID WE BECOME THE “NAKED APE”?
~ Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. Did we adapt to semi-aquatic environments? Does bare skin help us sweat to keep cool while hunting during the heat of the day? Did losing our fur allow us to read each other's emotional responses such as fuming or blushing? Scientists aren't exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level.
Sarah Millar, co-senior author of the new study and a dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that scientists are largely at a loss to explain why different hair patterns appear across human bodies. “We have really long hair on our scalps and short hair in other regions, and we’re hairless on our palms and the underside of our wrists and the soles of our feet,” she says. “No one understands really at all how these differences arise.”
In many mammals, an area known as the plantar skin, which is akin to the underside of the wrist in humans, is hairless, along with the footpads. But in a few species, including polar bears and rabbits, the plantar area is covered in fur. A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth.
To investigate, the team compared normally developing mice with a group that had a mutation which prevents Dkk2 from being produced. They found that the mutant mice had hair growing on their plantar skin, providing more evidence that the inhibitor plays a role in determining what’s furry and what’s not.
But Millar suspects that the Dkk2 protein is not the end of the story. The hair that developed on the plantar skin of the mice with the mutation was shorter, finer and less evenly spaced than the rest of the animals’ hair. “Dkk2 is enough to prevent hair from growing, but not to get rid of all control mechanisms. There’s a lot more to look at.”
Even without the full picture, the finding could be important in future research into conditions like baldness, since the WNT pathway is likely still present in chrome domes—it’s just being blocked by Dkk2 or similar inhibitors in humans. Millar says understanding the way the inhibitor system works could also help in research of other skin conditions like psoriasis and vitiligo, which causes a blotchy loss of coloration on the skin.
With a greater understanding of how skin is rendered hairless, the big question remaining is why humans became almost entirely hairless apes. Millar says there are some obvious reasons—for instance, having hair on our palms and wrists would make knapping stone tools or operating machinery rather difficult, and so human ancestors who lost this hair may have had an advantage. The reason the rest of our body lost its fur, however, has been up for debate for decades.
One popular idea that has gone in and out of favor since it was proposed is called the aquatic ape theory. The hypothesis suggests that human ancestors lived on the savannahs of Africa, gathering and hunting prey. But during the dry season, they would move to oases and lakesides and wade into shallow waters to collect aquatic tubers, shellfish or other food sources. The hypothesis suggests that, since hair is not a very good insulator in water, our species lost our fur and developed a layer of fat. The hypothesis even suggests that we might have developed bipedalism due to its advantages when wading into shallow water. But this idea, which has been around for decades, hasn’t received much support from the fossil record and isn’t taken seriously by most researchers.
A more widely accepted theory is that, when human ancestors moved from the cool shady forests into the savannah, they developed a new method of thermoregulation. Losing all that fur made it possible for hominins to hunt during the day in the hot grasslands without overheating. An increase in sweat glands, many more than other primates, also kept early humans on the cool side. The development of fire and clothing meant that humans could keep cool during the day and cozy up at night.
But these are not the only possibilities, and perhaps the loss of hair is due to a combination of factors. Evolutionary scientist Mark Pagel at the University of Reading has also proposed that going fur-less reduced the impact of lice and other parasites. Humans kept some patches of hair, like the stuff on our heads which protects from the sun and the stuff on our pubic regions which retains secreted pheromones. But the more hairless we got, Pagel says, the more attractive it became, and a stretch of hairless hide turned into a potent advertisement of a healthy, parasite-free mate.
One of the most intriguing theories is that the loss of hair on the face and some of the hair around the genitals may have helped with emotional communication. Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of human cognition at the research company 2AI, studies vision and color theory, and he says the reason for our hairless bodies may be in our eyes. While many animals have two types of cones, or the receptors in the eye that detect color, humans have three. Other animals that have three cones or more, like birds and reptiles, can see in a wide range of wavelengths in the visible light spectrum. But our third cone is unusual—it gives us a little extra power to detect hues right in the middle of the spectrum, allowing humans to pick out a vast range of shades that seem unnecessary for hunting or tracking.
Changizi proposes that the third cone allows us to communicate nonverbally by observing color changes in the face. “Having those two cones detecting wavelengths side by side is what you want if you want to be sensitive to oxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin to understand health or emotional changes,” he says. For instance, a baby whose skin looks a little green or blue can indicate illness, a pink blush might indicate sexual attraction, and a face flushing with red could indicate anger, even in people with darker skin tones. But the only way to see all of these emotional states is if humans lose their fur, especially on their faces.
In a 2006 paper in Biology Letters, Changizi found that primates with bare faces and sometimes bare rumps also tended to have three cones like humans, while fuzzy-faced monkeys lived their lives with just two cones. According to the paper, hairless faces and color vision seem to run together.
Millar says that it’s unlikely that her work will help us directly figure out whether humans are swimming apes, sweaty monkeys or blushing primates. But combining the new study’s molecular evidence of how hair grows with physical traits observed in humans will get us closer to the truth—or at least closer to a fuller, shinier head of hair. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-did-humans-lose-their-fur?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Homo neanderthalensis also evolved to shed most of their body hair.
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CAN ONE MEDITATE WITHOUT MEDITATING?
~ It can seem like a Catch-22 is baked into the practice of meditation. It’s meant, among other things, to foster patience—but meditation also seems to require considerable patience to work. Or at least “mindfulness meditation” does. (There are many ways to meditate; the practice isn’t monolithic.) When I began to toy with it several years ago—because of the demonstrable health benefits science was showing it could provide—I found that I couldn’t stand the “mindfulness” version. In “The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation,” a 2015 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Yi-Yuan Tang and colleagues write that mindfulness meditation is often described as “non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences.” I agree. That’s why it’s so frustrating.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. A friend on Facebook, a perceptual psychology professor at Georgia Tech, recommended I give Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran, a read. I loved it. The focus isn’t on mindfulness, as Tang defines it, but on mantra. Instead of trying to passively, non-judgmentally, attend to the thoughts that arise in consciousness, or moment-to-moment experience, the goal is to deliberately focus on a single saying to the exclusion of other thoughts that vie for attention. For 30 minutes after my morning shower, I’d sit and say, “As long as there is suffering, I am here to joyfully serve. As long as there is happiness, I am here to rejoice. Calmly, peacefully, rama,” over and over.
Honestly, it felt more like a trip to the gym than relaxing in the hot tub, and I found my mind looking for reasons not to do it. Typical studies in humans have them meditating for a half hour per day for a whole month. If you’ve ever tried to meditate, for even five minutes, you know that it’s hard. And the purported great effects of meditation, as suggested by many religious traditions, only come after years of practice. It’s easy for people to come to the conclusion, much like they do with exercise, that it’s just not worth the effort. I meditated regularly for about a year and a half before I stopped, in part because I couldn’t keep out thoughts of all of the other things I could be doing with my time. Why does it take so long to produce a benefit?
As Tang and his colleagues conclude in their 2015 paper, “knowledge of the mechanisms that underlie the effects of meditation is still in its infancy.” Yet it is safe to say, given the results of over two decades of research, that mindfulness meditation, the researchers write, “might cause neuroplastic changes in the structure and function” of the brain areas responsible for “attention, emotion and self-awareness.” For example, meditation appears to increase the strength of the connections between part of your forebrain and your emotional systems—the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the limbic system, respectively—allowing you more control over your emotions, just not right away. These complex physical changes simply take time. You can’t rewire your brain in any fundamental way overnight.
But what if you could do it, if not overnight, but more quickly, or with less effort? Would it still be legitimate? Although meditators might have a knee-jerk reaction to any kind of easy way out, it was the Dalai Lama who urged neuroscientists to look for ways to get the same kind of brain stimulation without actually meditating. (Even he Dalai Lama finds it onerous to meditate for four hours a day!)
A recent study suggests we might be on the first step of the path to inducing meditative states without meditation—at least in mice. Aldis Weible, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues, seemed to give mice the benefits of meditation just by shining a laser into their eyes. They started by breeding mice with some unusual properties: Their mouse brain frontal areas would get more active when researchers shined a particular kind of laser into their eyes. This uses a technique, optogenetics, which makes exposure to light in the eyes affect neuronal processing. In this first group of mice, a laser in the eyes made their ACCs more rhythmic and active. Another group of mice was bred so that light would optogenetically create reduced frontal activation in the presence of the light, and a third, the control group, was not affected by light in any way.
These mice had lasers in their eyes for 30 minutes per day for 20 days—what it takes to get effects from meditation in humans—to get the little ACCs of the mice to be rhythmic. It’s important not just that the ACC is more active, but that it’s active in a kind of rhythm, mirroring what happens in meditative states. These mice showed lower levels of anxiety, as measured by how much time they spent in the dark (mice naturally explore lighted areas when feeling safe, and hide in the dark when stressed. Unlike humans, mice feel safer in the dark.)
Although this paper was inspired by the findings of meditation training, it wasn’t designed to show that we can look at a laser instead of meditating—its purpose was to provide further evidence of how emotions are manipulated by connections between the ACC and the limbic system. And for this method to work on humans, we’d need to be bred so that light affects us the same way. In other words, it’s too late for anybody alive today. (Just to be crystal clear, please don’t start shining a laser pointer into your eye.)
But it shows an example of how some of meditation’s effects are, in essence, biological changes, and that those changes need not be caused by meditation. Maybe someday there will be an easier way. But for now, there’s focusing on your breath for half an hour, or on a saying, or on nothing in particular. Good luck.
http://nautil.us/blog/this-could-be-a-way-to-get-the-benefits-of-meditation-without-meditating
Oriana:
This reminded me of something popular a few decades ago: repeating mantra-like affirmations. I don’t mean the “prosperity gospel” based on the belief that it’s enough to “put it to the universe” that you want to be a millionaire, and — without any further effort — millions of dollars start flowing into your bank account. I mean the something similar to the example from Passages: “I am here to joyfully serve.”
I also have notebooks filled with favorite poems, poems I love for their beauty and wisdom. I wonder — would reading the same poem over and over, for fifteen minutes (I am not sure I could do it for a whole half-hour) have a similar effect? It would be very interesting to try.
We tend to have repetitive thoughts anyway, and, alas, those are often the "wrong thoughts," the kind that exacerbate misery. We might as well repeat something that will enlarge our lives.
I imagine some readers found the part about mice and the anterior cingulate cortex too technical. I invite those readers to explore the highly readable book by Daniel Amen, M.D., Change Your Brain Change Your Life. Take a look at Chapter 9: Looking Into Worry and Obsessiveness. Continue to Chapter 10: Getting Unstuck.
~ The cingulate system of the brain allows us to shift our attention from thing to thing, idea to idea, issue to issue. When it is dysfunctional, we have a tendency to get locked into negative thoughts or behaviors; we have trouble seeing the options in situations. Healing this part of the mind involves training the mind to see options and new ideas. ~
Training exercises for getting unstuck follow, repeating an equivalent of a mantra being only one of them. And the chapters on the deep limbic system and on the basal ganglia are even better. Words and behavior do rewire the brain. This is life-changing information.
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WHY DOES PAUL SWITCH FROM TALKING ABOUT ‘JEWS’ TO ‘ISRAEL’?
~ To answer this question, we need to step back a bit to look at how the term “Israel” was understood and used by Paul’s contemporaries. Surprisingly, it turns out that other first-century Jews also distinguish between “Israelites” and “Jews.” One good example is Josephus, a first-century Jewish priest who wrote a history of the Jewish people (Jewish Antiquities). Josephus stops using the term “Israel” around the midpoint of his history, at which point he begins using the term “Jew,” which is much rarer in the first half where Israel appears.
Interestingly, unlike Paul, Josephus actually explains why he switches terms, saying that although many Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile, “the whole of Israel remained in that land [of exile], so it came about that only two tribes returned to Asia and Europe and are subject to the Romans. But the ten tribes are still beyond the Euphrates River and are a boundless multitude too great to number” (Antiquities 11.132). He then explains that “after they [the two tribes] returned from Babylon, they were called Jews after the tribe of Judah, since that was the prominent tribe” (Jewish Antiquities, 11.173).
To understand what Josephus is talking about here, we have to take another step back to the story of Israel in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament), where Israel is the name of the twelve-tribe people of God led out of Egypt in the exodus that eventually becomes a unified kingdom under David, who was from the tribe of Judah. But the unity among these twelve tribes is fleeting, as the ten northern tribes broke off to form their own kingdom after the death of David’s son, Solomon. The result was two kingdoms: the northern kingdom, which retained the name “Israel,” and the southern kingdom of Judah, which was ruled by David’s descendants. The odd result of this is that “Israel” could refer either to the whole twelve-tribe people of God (that is, “all Israel”) or the ten-tribe kingdom to the north of Judah.
The northern kingdom was actually the stronger and more prosperous of the two, but it also drew the attention of the Neo-Assyrian Empire because of its strategic importance along an important trade route connecting Mesopotamia and Egypt. After a few ill-advised attempts to shake off Assyrian control in the mid-eighth century BCE, the northern kingdom finally came to an end when the Assyrians sacked the capital city of Samaria in around 722 BCE and converted the territory into an Assyrian province.
The Assyrians were experts at breaking up rebellious people groups; their primary strategy was to deport much of the population, dispersing them among different regions of the Assyrian empire, ensuring that they were spread too thin to unify and rebel again. And within a few generations, these dispersed groups would typically intermarry among the other people groups in those areas, effectively losing their distinct ethnic identity and becoming melting-pot Assyrians. (Such practices are considered genocide by today’s standards.) This is ultimately what happened to the northern kingdom of Israel, as Assyria deported large portions of the population, scattering them into separate areas. (For a theologically-charged and hyperbolic account of these deportations, see 2 Kings 17.)
Many from the north fled south during these events, but only twenty years later, King Hezekiah of Judah foolishly repeated the mistakes of the northern kings and rebelled against Assyria. According to the records of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, this resulted in the deportations of over 200,000 people from Hezekiah’s kingdom—including many refugees who had fled from the north. Interestingly, Sennacherib did not depose Hezekiah himself (there’s some evidence that suggests Sennacherib’s mother was closely related to Hezekiah), and Judah remained a distinct kingdom, though effectively reduced to the territory immediately around Jerusalem, for a few more generations. A little over a century later (587/6 BCE), the Babylonians finally brought the kingdom of Judah to an end, famously destroying Jerusalem, burning the Temple of YHWH (the God of Israel), and deporting those of consequence to Babylon.
While all this was happening, a series of prophets engaged in withering critiques of Israelite and Judahite society, proclaiming that YHWH would destroy both kingdoms and scatter his people because of persistent injustice and idolatry, each of which represented a breach of contract with YHWH. But that’s not all these prophets proclaimed; the final versions of these prophetic books also promise that YHWH would ultimately restore his people from their scattered state after they learned their lesson. Remarkably, these prophecies often emphasized that this return would include a reunification of Israel and Judah (for examples, see Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36–37). This expectation of the reconstitution and restoration of all twelve tribes of Israel became an important part of Jewish theology thereafter.
This brings us back to the events Josephus is talking about in the passages cited above. Babylon was soon conquered by the Persians, who presented themselves as liberators to those who had been oppressed by the Assyrians and Babylonians. As part of this policy of liberation, many from Judah who had been exiled to Babylon (or their descendants) were allowed to return to their homeland once again. Prophecy fulfilled, right! Well, not quite. Don’t forget that many of the prophecies about Israel’s restoration go out of their way to include not only those from Judah but also from the northern tribes of Israel.
That’s ultimately what Josephus is referring to—he explicitly says that only those from Judah returned while the rest of Israel remained on the other side of the Euphrates, still awaiting the promised return and reunification of all Israel. Josephus explains that this is why he stops saying “Israel” and starts talking about “Jews”: after the return from Babylon, the lens has narrowed from Israel as a whole to those from the southern kingdom of Judah. For Josephus, at least, “Israel” is not synonymous with the Jews. Instead, Israel is a larger group that includes but is not limited to Jews, much like “American” includes but is not limited to New Yorkers.
A closer look at other sources from the period shows that Josephus’ distinction between these terms was pretty typical in this time period. There’s also a lot of concern about exactly where the other ten tribes are (our best evidence is that most of the tribes like Reuben and Naphtali simply intermarried and disappeared), and the Samaritans claim to be descendants of some of the northern tribes. Most Jews seem to have rejected that claim to Israelite status as illegitimate, viewing Samaritans as the result of intermarriage between the people Assyria resettled within the land and the Israelites left behind. (Note, however, that neither Jews nor Samaritans view the Samaritans as Jews—the debate is over Israelite status, not Jewish status.)
Once we recognize this distinction, a few other things get clearer, starting with the historical Jesus himself. Take note that Jesus proclaimed the coming of the “kingdom of God” and chose twelve apostles, who he promised would “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt 19:28 // Luke 22:30). But there were no twelve tribes in Jesus’ day! The point of this promise was that Jesus himself was initiating the long-awaited restoration of all twelve tribes—they may not be here yet, but they will be! The “kingdom of God” would be the restored Israel of the prophets, through which God himself would bring justice to all the nations. This was the radical apocalyptic message Jesus went to the cross proclaiming and attempting to initiate.
Of course, that raises an obvious question for those around after Jesus’ crucifixion: did Jesus fail? Where is Israel’s restoration? Why haven’t the twelve tribes returned? And if you’re Paul, you’re also left trying to explain why all these gentiles are responding to the gospel message—which, remember, is about Israel’s messiah-king and the restoration of Israel! Has God simply abandoned Israel and elected a new people from the nations? This is precisely the question Paul is trying to answer in Romans 9–11, and in answering it, he returns to the question of exactly who constitutes Israel in the first place. And as it turns out, he argues that because “Israel” is something bigger than the Jews alone, the salvation of “all Israel” will require something bigger, something miraculous. ~ Jason Staples
https://ehrmanblog.org/when-paul-says-israel-does-he-mean-the-jews-guest-post-by-jason-staples/
Oriana:
Ah, the “lost tribes” again! The Mormons made it a part of their creed that Native Americans were descended from those lost tribes. Now anyone can look up the origin of Native Americans and learn that they are related to Siberian tribes. Still, somehow the idea of finding the “lost tribes” of Israel had a significant cultural impact.
I greatly appreciate this account of how the northern “tribes” were deported and deliberately scattered so they could not maintain their ethnic identity and eventually intermarried and became part of the “Assyrian melting pot.” Simply the necessity of using the dominant language molds a person away from the original identity. We don’t generally see it as a tragedy.
But at yet another level, I can see the point of differentiating “Israel” from “the Jews.” Israel is a more elevated concept: it is an ideal, just as “America” is an ideal and not merely a synonym of “the United States.” We speak of the American values, the American Dream, the American Flag — there’s an almost mystical sanctity to those. And, in parallel, there are the Jewish values and all that makes a particular culture distinct.
And it's "Listen, Israel" — not "Listen, Jews."
Actually all Christians can call themselves "Israel." Presumably that's what Paul, the "apostle to the Gentiles," meant: "God is like a potter who creates some vessels for destruction and others for glory. God has called out His people from both the Gentiles and the Jews to faith in Christ."
Paul's revolutionary move was breaking with the idea that in order to be saved you first had to become Jewish, which meant not only keeping the kosher laws, but, for men, it meant circumcision. Paul did away with that and founded an international religion.
Meanwhile the real lost tribes became “lost” for good. Their remote descendants are most likely Muslim. The old dream of reuniting all the tribes is archaic — although in modern times it got transformed into the idea of returning to Zion and creating a Jewish state called, understandably, Israel. That state is now a reality — but a complicated, embattled kind of reality. As we know, the relationship between the Ideal and the Real has always been a difficult one.
Amos Oz, author of A Tale of Love and Darkness*
**
CAN POOP FROM THE YOUNG REJUVENATE? (repost)
~ “The connection between microbes and lifespan dates back to Ilya Metchnikoff—an eccentric Russian Nobel laureate who the microbiologist Paul de Kruif once described as a “hysterical character out of one of Dostoevsky’s novels.” He believed that intestinal microbes produced toxins that caused illness, senility, and aging, and were “the principal cause of the short duration of human life.” (His claim, though baseless, apparently started a fashion for colostomy in the early 20th century.)
On the other hand, he also thought that some microbes could prolong life by producing lactic acid, which killed their harmful cousins. That was why, Metchnikoff believed, Bulgarian peasants who regularly drank sour milk would often become centenarians.
In 1908, Metchnikoff wrote about his ideas in a book called The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies—an ironic title given that the man was a profound pessimist who had twice tried to kill himself. Still, he also quite literally put his money where his mouth was by regularly drinking sour milk, and created a fad that would culminate in the modern probiotics industry. Metchnikoff died at the age of 71, and his claims haven’t quite stood the test of time. But more recently, several groups of scientists have shown that animal microbiomes can indeed influence the lifespans of their hosts.
Dario Valenzano showed that the killifish—an extremely short-lived fish that’s being increasingly used in studies of aging—lives longer if old individuals consume the poop of younger ones, suggesting either that old microbiomes quicken the deaths of these fish, or that young microbiomes can prolong their lives.
For Wang, the ultimate goal is to develop genetically engineered strains of bacteria that can improve human health—a souped-up, life-extending probiotic for modern-day Metchnikoffs to quaff. But that won’t be easy. Despite a lot of research and development, existing probiotics are largely underwhelming, because it is very hard to get these bacteria to stably colonize the gut. “That’s a challenge for the entire field, and we’re collaborating with others to find different ways around it,” says Wang.
A different option would be to find microbe-made chemicals like colanic acid that could have anti-aging effects on their own. “Making people live longer and healthier is very different from treating diseases,” explains Wang. “If I talk to a patient and say I have a magic drug that can cure their disease but has side effects, I think they’d take it. But if you tell a healthy person that you have a compound that would extend their life by five years, but has side effects we don’t know about… I would be hesitant. That’s why I’m looking to the microbiome. Maybe we can find natural compounds that come from the microbes that we can use to boost our health. They’d be safe because they’re already there.”
Indeed, the team has already shown that colanic acid can also extend the life of fruit flies, and can affect the mitochondria of mammalian cells in the same way that it did those of the worms. (Colanic acid stimulates these tiny power plants to split apart, making extra copies of themselves. It also switches on a group of genes that help mitochondria deal with stressful conditions, and that have been previously linked to longer life in worms.) “I don’t want to speculate too much, but that makes us positive,” Wang says. “We’re now starting experiments with mice.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/a-tiny-tweak-to-gut-bacteria-can-extend-an-animals-life/530364/
Ilya Metchnikoff (also spelled Mechnikov)
*
MICROBIOME AND LONGEVITY
~ A study carried out in 15 Italian centenarians and 24 super-centenarians reported that these two groups both carry an abundance of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes – bacteria considered beneficial to human health.
These results are in line with another study of 4 centenarians and 63 nonagenarians in China.
Both studies highlighted how specific beneficial gut bacteria are dominant in the gut microbiome of healthy Italian and Chinese centenarians and super-centenarians, providing strong evidence for a functional link between healthy gut microbiome and healthy aging.
https://ixcela.com/resources/is-there-a-common-gut-microbiome-signature-of-longevity.html
Oriana:
One way to increase Bacteroidetes is to eat more beans and animal protein. Eating more carbohydrates tends to increase Firmicutes, potentially promoting obesity.
Based on the studies of centenarians in the so-called "Blue Zones" (places with highest life expectancy), the recommended amount of beans (or legumes such as peas) is one cup every day.
Want to live to be 100? Eat legumes (peas, beans)
*
THE LETHALITY OF COVID IN AMERICA HAS FALLEN BY ABOUT THREE-QUARTERS SINCE ITS PEAK
~ Some of those looking for good news have been especially focused on the heterogeneity of the T-cell aspects of the immune response, because a handful of studies have found that a quite significant number of people unexposed to the coronavirus nevertheless exhibited what are called “cross-reactive” T-cell immune responses to the disease. In other words, you didn’t necessarily need to catch COVID-19 for your T-cells to know how to fight it, because previous exposure to similar coronaviruses (chiefly the common cold) had already taught your immune systems how to respond to this one.
The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing. The headline findings have been quite eye-popping to those who assumed this coronavirus was truly “novel,” in the sense of encountering a susceptible population with no preparation whatsoever for combating it: At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
As cases exploded in the U.S. earlier in the summer when the country came out of lockdown, some rise in deaths was inevitable. But even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases.
Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today. In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
Of course, death is not the only worrisome outcome of COVID-19, which has caused concerning complications that can extend for at least months, even in many whose cases were considered “mild.” But a fourfold decline in lethality is quite significant, and very much worth celebrating, whether or not doing so encourages a relaxation of vigilance — the same concern that governs public-health caution over the question of herd immunity.
For his part, Gu sees the decline in lethality largely as a matter of age, with most of the recent spread among the young. Balloux cautions that he is speculating, but suggests another possibility: that there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
. . . preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses. ~
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/reasons-for-covid-19-optimism-on-t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html
T cell under an electron microscope*
HEALTH BENEFITS OF SUMMER SQUASH (ZUCCHINI, YELLOW SQUASH)
Research has shown that the polysaccharides in summer squash include an unusual amount of pectin—a specially structured polysaccharide that often include special chains of D-galacturonic acid called homogalacturonan. It's this unique polysaccharide composition in summer squash that is being linked in repeated animal studies to protection against diabetes and better regulation of insulin. We expect to see future studies on humans confirming these same types of benefits from consumption of summer squash.
ending on beauty:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
~ T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
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