Sculpture by Victor Tkachenko*
EVA BRAUN
There are only two beings I trust:
my dog and Eva Braun.
~ Adolph Hitler
Against his orders I came to Berlin:
“‘I will be with you to the end” —
Russian shells were falling
near the Chancellery.
Hitler sat in a chair,
with trembling hands
stroking a puppy in his lap.
He told me his secret
dream: after the war,
to live with me
in a small Austrian town,
and give himself to art.
*
Hitler wore his military uniform,
I, a black taffeta gown;
all the women in tears,
as always at weddings.
I began to sign with a B for Braun,
crossed the letter out;
for the first and last time,
signed myself Eva Hitler.
A moment later a bomb
hit the bunker’s roof;
flakes of cement from the ceiling
fell on us like deathly rice.
*
Hitler, though a tee-totaler,
drank a little Tokay wine,
then walked out to dictate
his “Political Testament”:
The German people
have not proved worthy of me.
The phonograph played over and over
the only record there was,
Blood-red roses tell you of happiness.
There are many of us, Eurydices
dancing at our wedding in hell.
“I had one flaw as a leader,” he said:
“kind-heartedness.” Tell me,
do we choose the one we love?
*
photograph of my life:
my body curled
in the corner of the sofa,
my hand reaching for my Führer’s arm.
~ Oriana
Eva Braun with Hitler and their dogs
Mary:
The poem about "Eva Braun" is disturbing. Giving a romantic frame to her story creates for me a cognitive dissonance — it seems impossible to accept Hitler as a romantic partner even in his lover's fantasy, impossible to see their end as tragedy, since tragedy demands some investment in the tragic hero's character. We have to care enough to see their end as tragic, and I don't and can't. To me it is only grotesque and not at all pathetic. I see her in her "black taffeta" "dancing in (her) wedding in hell," and feel only that is her proper place, with the man who made hell on earth for so many.
"Do we choose the one we love?" Is a challenging question. Can we love a monster and be innocent of his monstrosity? In the old romantic love at first sight, soul mate, the other half of my soul, there is both the idea of inevitability and of a powerful, irresistible fatedness. This both implicates and absolves guilt. You fall for your other half, your reflection, If that is a monster, some of that monster reflects the monstrous in you. On the side of absolution, it is presented as an overwhelming emotional surge, that sweeps you under and away, even despite your will and better judgement.
In the poem Eva's assent is clear in her fear she will slip up and forget to call him Führer, and in her fear to displease him, so strong she will sit on a lit cigarette rather than incur his wrath. [Oriana: I’ve removed that preliminary section.] Despite whatever forces hold them together, there is always a level of choice. Always. It may be cloaked in denial, but at its dark heart is that "boot in the face" the "love of the rack and the screw" Plath references in "Daddy." The dynamic is powerful and power-filled, and tends to end badly...even when, like Plath, you have awareness of your own assent, your own agreement, to the violence and horror embedded in the relationship.
*
Oriana:
I saw the wedding scene in a movie, and I also read a sympathetic biography of Eva Braun. For whatever mysterious reason, at one point I just had to write about those last days in the bunker and that wedding, so engraved in my mind.
Also, I'm always strongly affected when I read that a public monster is a devout husband and father/grandfather. Dictators smiling at little children — instantly Stalin comes to mind. And perhaps the more monstrous the dictator, the more he needs to smile at little children.
I didn’t mean to romanticize Hitler. I hope his delusional state during the collapse of the Third Reich comes through — his dream of giving himself to art “after the war”; the statement that the German people have not proved worthy of him and that his greatest flaw as a leader was “kind-heartedness.”
(One unforgettable detail from that biography of Eva Braun: apparently many German women were infatuated with Hitler. At one of the headquarters, there was a whole room filled with pillows embroidered by various women with “Ich liebe Sie” — “I love you,” but using the polite form of address.)
*
A STORY ABOUT DYING
My father’s death was a hard one.
He had emphysema and liver cancer, and in the hospital they gave him morphine to ease the pain, but the morphine did the opposite. It brought back memories of his four years as a slave laborer in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
My mother and I sat in the hospital room with him and tried to comfort him, but he thought we were German guards come to take him to the ovens. Dying, he tried to crawl out of his bed, pleading all the while for us to spare him. Finally, the nurses had to strap him down and give him more morphine.
My mother sat next to him all the time — holding his hand, whispering “Janek, Janek,” the name his mother called him, but he still struggled, wept, tried to loosen the straps around his hands and feet.
In the corridor, there was some noise, and my mother looked up.
Four nurses stood there talking. One of them smiled and then laughed, and the others started laughing too.
My mother looked at me, nodded slowly, and said, “Half of us are going to the grave, and the other half are going to a wedding.”
~ John Guzlowski
Oriana:
”Janek, Janek" — this is an endearment form of the name Jan (J is pronounced like Y: Yahn). It introduced an element of tenderness. The repetition enhances the tenderness.
My father was reliving WW2 when he was having hallucinations caused by levo-DOPA, prescribed for his Parkinson’s disease (a macabre way to die)
I can't predict my own delirium, but I can predict my own dementia, should it happen: I'd probably be in my forties, married, preoccupied with some household trivia so my husband won't criticize me when he comes back from work.
Years ago I would have predicted returning to the time of my coming to America — after all, it still echoes in my dreams, this loss of home, an immigrant's classic trauma of losing the familiar. But now I think it will be my housewife years and the quiet desperation of being strangled by daily trivia and petty criticism. Yet who knows . . . those were also the years of intense creativity. We simply can’t predict into which private world of ours we’ll withdraw at the end — provided it’s no a sudden death. It seems that everyone would prefer sudden death.
Mary:
Counter that opening poem with John Guzlowski's story of his father's dying, where pain takes and traps him in the horrors he suffered in Hitler's slave labor camps, and he begs for relief no one can give him. Or my own father, in delirium from Parkinson's and fever, reliving being under fire in that same war, begging the nurses to come shelter in the trenches, outside the line of fire. His wish to get others to safety, like John's mother tenderly murmuring her husband’s name, trying to soothe him — these are acts of love, this is redemption.
*
Let’s cheer up with an affirmative story:
~ [Carol Matthau] tells of the Christmas Day that Charlie Chaplin died and of Oona [Chaplin’s wife] going into deep mourning. She remembers that she and Oona once read an uplifting passage from Willa Cather’s Lucy Grayheart together, so she tears that passage out of her first edition(given to her by Oona) and mails it to her. The passage is about a young widow lifted out of mourning by thoughts of her old hometown sweetheart. She takes to dressing up and dreaming about him, but when she actually runs across him one day the meeting is sad. That night she stands looking out the window in her room nd sees snow falling — white, lacy snow with blue lights, quite magical. She opens the window and for a long time watches snow fall, then puts one hand out, almost to her elbow, then the other.
‘and then she put her face out and let the snow fall on it, and it made her face feel wonderful. She looked up above the trees to the sky, which was filled with beautiful white snow, swirling, gently falling on leaves, trees, ground, rooftops. And she loved watching it. And suddenly she knew something. That old sweetheart is life itself.’
~ Donald Newland, Painted Paragraphs, p. 82.
Mary:
How
wonderful to think that in dying, what we will miss is that old
sweetheart, life itself, and that we might find in those last moments,
not fear, but curiosity, that death might be one more surprise, not full
of terror, but lovely and cool as falling snow on a winter night.
*
“That old sweetheart is life itself” — let’s keep this in mind as we read the next brief essay.
*
ELDER ORPHANS: WHO WILL HOLD YOUR HAND AS YOU DIE?
~ There’s a crucial way station between independence and dependence, says Keren Brown Wilson, Ph.D., widely credited as the architect of assisted living. That way station is interdependence—a mutual reliance on one another.
Wilson doesn’t equivocate when she talks about the importance of leaning on others. “People think I’m a professional woman. I’ve done all these things, and I can take care of myself. I think that nobody can take care of themselves,” says Wilson. “Gender has nothing to do with it. Age doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s recognizing that there’s a need to be interdependent.”
Wilson doesn’t have children, though she wanted them. She’s dedicated to improving life for elders, particularly those with limited means. “In the absence of adult blood relatives,” she says, “we have to figure out what to do. To deny it is kind of silly. There are lots of ways to form relationships that go beyond blood.”
Deepen ties with people you already care about to form a family of the heart. Or tap a sibling’s kids or trusted neighbor. Many will consider it a compliment to be asked to play a more active role in your life. Develop a list, so if someone declines you have alternatives at the ready.
None of my family of origin lives nearby. After my divorce, I turned to friends to fill roles should I need help in the future. It wasn’t easy, but once I spit out the question, everyone said yes. I’ve since signed on to take on roles for others who may need my help. It feels really good to lean on one another.
For years, I obsessed about who would hold my hand when I die. I know I’m not the only one—it’s the most frequent worry those without kids have shared with me. Perhaps because the answer isn’t an obvious person.
I’ve recently shifted my thinking about my last day. Instead of worrying about it, I now am curious to discover who will be by my side. Maybe it will be someone I’ve known forever, or perhaps a kind face I won’t even recognize.
I picture a loving presence nearby, my hand in theirs. “My, my,” I will say. “So it’s you.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unapparent/202106/elder-orphans-who-will-hold-our-hands-the-end-life
Oriana:
Much as I’d like the last words I hear and the last words I speak to be “I love you,” after reading the uplifting passage by Willa Cather I realized that perhaps there is nothing terrible — at least for me — about dying without holding someone’s hand. After all, as a writer and as a human being I always preferred solitude, that “sole beatitude.” My primary engagement has been with “that old sweetheart, life itself.”
Not that we are in control of our last moments, but that’s also fine with me. That old sweetheart, life itself, is full of surprises. And it’s my curiosity that has kept me alive so far — has kept me from committing suicide because I simply want to know what happens next.
*
THE HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC CAR
~ In 1897, the bestselling car in the US was an electric vehicle: the Pope Manufacturing Company’s Columbia Motor Carriage. Electric models were outselling steam- and petrol-powered ones. By 1900, sales of steam vehicles had taken a narrow lead: that year, 1,681 steam vehicles, 1,575 electric vehicles and 936 petrol-powered vehicles were sold. Only with the launch of the Olds Motor Works’ Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1903 did petrol-powered vehicles take the lead for the first time.
Perhaps the most remarkable example, to modern eyes, of how things might have worked out differently for electric vehicles is the story of the Electrobat, an electric taxicab that briefly flourished in the late 1890s. The Electrobat had been created in Philadelphia in 1894 by Pedro Salom and Henry Morris, two scientist-inventors who were enthusiastic proponents of electric vehicles. In a speech in 1895, Salom derided “the marvelously complicated driving gear of a gasoline vehicle, with its innumerable chains, belts, pulleys, pipes, valves and stopcocks … Is it not reasonable to suppose, with so many things to get out of order, that one or another of them will always be out of order?”
The two men steadily refined their initial design, eventually producing a carriage-like vehicle that could be controlled by a driver on a high seat at the back, with a wider seat for passengers in the front. In 1897 Morris and Salom launched a taxi service in Manhattan with a dozen vehicles, serving 1,000 passengers in their first month of operation. But the cabs had limited range and their batteries took hours to recharge. So Morris and Salom merged with another firm, the Electric Battery Company. Its engineers had devised a clever battery-swapping system, based at a depot at 1684 Broadway, that could replace an empty battery with a fully charged one in seconds, allowing the Electrobats to operate all day.
In 1899 this promising business attracted the attention of William Whitney, a New York politician and financier, who had made a fortune investing in electric streetcars, or trams. He dreamed of establishing a monopoly on urban transport, and imagined fleets of electric cabs operating in major cities around the world, providing a cleaner, quieter alternative to horse-drawn vehicles. Instead of buying cars, which were still far beyond the means of most people, city dwellers would use electric taxis and streetcars to get around. But realizing this vision would mean building Electrobats on a much larger scale. So Whitney and his friends teamed up with Pope, maker of the bestselling Columbia electric vehicle. They formed a new venture called the Electric Vehicle Company, and embarked on an ambitious expansion plan. EVC raised capital to build thousands of electric cabs and opened offices in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey and Newport. In 1899 it was briefly the largest automobile manufacturer in the US.
But its taxi operations outside New York were badly run and failed to make money. Repeated reorganizations and recapitalizations prompted accusations that EVC was an elaborate financial swindle. The industry journal the Horseless Age, a strong advocate of petrol-powered vehicles, attacked the firm as a would-be monopolist and said electric vehicles were doomed to fail. When news emerged that EVC had obtained a loan fraudulently, its share price plunged from $30 to $0.75, forcing the firm to start closing its regional offices. The Horseless Age savored its collapse and cheered its failure to “force” electric vehicles on a “credulous world”.
In the years that followed, as more people bought private cars, electric vehicles took on a new connotation: they were women’s cars. This association arose because they were suitable for short, local trips, did not require hand cranking to start or gear shifting to operate, and were extremely reliable by virtue of their simple design. As an advertisement for Babcock Electric vehicles put it in 1910, “She who drives a Babcock Electric has nothing to fear”. The implication was that women, unable to cope with the complexities of driving and maintaining petrol vehicles, should buy electric vehicles instead. Men, by contrast, were assumed to be more capable mechanics, for whom greater complexity and lower reliability were prices worth paying for powerful, manly petrol vehicles with superior performance and range.
Two manufacturers, Detroit Electric and Waverley Electric, launched models in 1912 that were said to have been completely redesigned to cater to women. As well as being electric, they were operated from the back seat, with a rear-facing front seat, to allow the driver to face her passengers – but also making it difficult to see the road. For steering they provided an old-fashioned tiller, rather than a wheel, which was meant to be less strenuous but was less precise and more dangerous.
Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, a Detroit Electric rather than one of his own Model Ts. Some men may have liked that electric cars’ limited range meant that the independence granted to their drivers was tightly constrained.
By focusing on women, who were a small minority of drivers – accounting for 15% of drivers in Los Angeles in 1914, for example, and 5% in Tucson – makers of electric cars were tacitly conceding their inability to compete with petrol-powered cars in the wider market.
That year, Henry Ford confirmed rumors that he was developing a low-cost electric car in conjunction with Thomas Edison. “The problem so far has been to build a storage battery of light weight which would operate for long distances without recharging,” he told the New York Times, putting his finger on the electric car’s primary weakness. But the car was repeatedly delayed, as Edison tried and failed to develop an alternative to the heavy, bulky lead-acid batteries used to power electric cars. Eventually, the entire project was quietly abandoned.
Sales of electric cars peaked in the early 1910s. As internal combustion engines became more reliable, they left electric vehicles in the dust.
Electric car, England, 1896
*
Electric cars might have been expected to benefit from the concerns over the sustainability of gas-guzzlers. But electric-car technology had made little progress since the 1920s. The biggest problem remained the battery: lead-acid batteries were still heavy and bulky and could not store much energy per unit of weight. The most famous electric vehicles of the 1970s, the four-wheeled lunar rovers driven by American astronauts on the moon, were powered by non-rechargeable batteries because they only had to operate for a few hours.
On Earth, attempts to revive electric cars as commercial products failed to get off the ground – until the emergence in the 90s of the rechargeable lithium ion battery. By 2003, Alan Cocconi and Tom Gage, two electric-car enthusiasts, had built an electric roadster called the tzero, powered by 6,800 camcorder batteries, capable of 0-60mph in less than four seconds and with a range of 250 miles. Tesla was founded to commercialize that technology.
Lithium-ion batteries have made the switch to electric cars possible, but because of tightening regulation of combustion-powered vehicles in order to address climate change, that switch now seems inevitable.
The automobile, having been introduced in part to address one pollution problem, has contributed to another one: carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
To what extent will electrifying road vehicles help address the climate crisis? Globally, transport (including land, sea and air) accounts for 24% of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Emissions from road vehicles are responsible for 17% of the global total. Of those emissions, about one-third are produced by heavy-duty, mostly diesel-powered vehicles (such as trucks and buses), and two-thirds by light-duty, mostly petrol-powered vehicles (such as cars and vans).
Switching to electric cars would thus make a big dent in global emissions, though the challenges of switching large trucks, ships and planes away from fossil fuels would remain. But it would not address other problems associated with cars, such as traffic congestion, road deaths or the inherent inefficiency of using a one-ton vehicle to move one person to the shops.
And just as the rise of the automobile led to worries about the sustainability and geopolitical consequences of relying on oil, the electric car raises similar concerns. The supply of lithium and cobalt needed to make batteries, and of the “rare earth” elements need to make electric motors, are already raising environmental and geopolitical questions.
Lithium is quite abundant, but cobalt is not, and the main source of it is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where around a quarter of production is done by hand, using shovels and torches. Conditions for miners are grim, and the industry is dogged by allegations of corruption and use of child labor. Once mined, cobalt is mostly refined in China, which also has the lion’s share of global lithium ion battery production capacity, and dominates production of rare-earth elements, too.
Geopolitical tensions have already led to disputes between China and western countries over the supply of computer chips and related manufacturing tools. So it is not hard to imagine similar disagreements breaking out over the minerals and parts needed to build electric vehicles. (This explains why Tesla has struck a deal with Glencore, a mining giant, to guarantee its supply of cobalt, and also operates its own battery factories, inside and outside China. It also explains why some companies are looking to deep-sea mining as an alternative source of cobalt.)
Moreover, history suggests it would be naive to assume that switching from one form of propulsion to another would mean things would otherwise continue as they were; that is not what happened when cars replaced horse-drawn vehicles. Some people say it’s time to rethink not just the propulsion technology that powers cars, but the whole idea of car ownership.
The future of urban transport will not be based on a single technology, but on a diverse mixture of transport systems, knitted together by smartphone technology. Collectively, ride-hailing, micromobility and on-demand car rental offer new approaches to transport that provide the convenience of a private car without the need to own one, for a growing fraction of journeys. Horace Dediu, a technology analyst, calls this “unbundling the car”, as cheaper, quicker, cleaner and more convenient alternatives slowly chip away at the rationale for mass car ownership.
Its ability to connect up these different forms of transport, to form an “internet of motion”, means that the smartphone, rather than any particular means of transport, is the true heir to the car. The internet of motion provides a way to escape from the car-based transport monoculture that exists in many cities. That should be welcomed, because the experience of the 20th century suggests that it would be a mistake to replace one transport monoculture with another, as happened with the switch from horses to cars. A transport monoculture is less flexible, and its unintended consequences become more easily locked in and more difficult to address.
As combustion engines are phased out, and cars, trains and other forms of ground transport go electric, direct emissions should not be a problem. (Electric transport will only be truly emission-free when it is powered by renewable power from a zero-carbon grid.) But transport systems will produce another form of potentially problematic output: data. In particular, they will produce reams of data about who went where, and when, and how, and with whom. They already do.
But mobility-service providers and privacy groups are concerned that MDS lets cities track individuals, and could, for example, allow the police to identify people who attend a demonstration or visit a particular location. They also worry that the foundation that oversees MDS will not store the data securely. It is not difficult to imagine the sort of things that an authoritarian regime might do with such data.
All of this suggests that personal-mobility data is likely to become a flashpoint in the future. This may seem like an esoteric concern, but the same could have been said of worries about carbon dioxide emissions, which are just as invisible, at the dawn of the automotive era. And unlike the people of that time, those building and using new mobility services today have the chance to address such concerns before it is too late.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/03/lost-history-electric-car-future-transport?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
There are always the unintended consequences. For example, lithium mining is destructive to the environment. Also, the production of electric cars is itself more polluting than the production of gas-using cars. And the energy used to charge the batteries of electric cars needs to come from renewable sources — and so far wind and solar are not yet up to where they should be if a great majority of the vehicles will be electric. Hopefully these problems will be alleviated in the future, but it’s of course not possible to achieve perfection.
Still, the idea of clean and quiet transportation is certainly appealing. Would hydrogen cars be better yet, once improved (they are dead for now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b88v-WvqzeQ)? Or perhaps not private cars, but an entirely different mode of transportation? Alas, I probably won’t live long enough to find out.
*
WHY ELEPHANTS RARELY GET CANCER
~ Elephants and other large animals have a lower incidence of cancer than would be expected statistically, suggesting that they have evolved ways to protect themselves against the disease. A new study reveals how elephants do it: An old gene that was no longer functional was recycled from the vast “genome junkyard” to increase the sensitivity of elephant cells to DNA damage, enabling them to cull potentially cancerous cells early.
In multicellular animals, cells go through many cycles of growth and division. At each division, cells copy their entire genome, and inevitably a few mistakes creep in. Some of those mutations can lead to cancer. One might think that animals with larger bodies and longer lives would therefore have a greater risk of developing cancer. But that’s not what researchers see when they compare species across a wide range of body sizes: The incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism or its lifespan. In fact, researchers find that larger, longer-lived mammals have fewer cases of cancer. In the 1970s, the cancer epidemiologist Richard Peto, now a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, articulated this surprising phenomenon, which has come to be known as Peto’s paradox.
The fact that larger animals like elephants do not have high rates of cancer suggests that they have evolved special cancer suppression mechanisms. In 2015, Joshua Schiffman at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Carlo Maley at Arizona State University headed a team of researchers who showed that the elephant genome has about 20 extra duplicates of p53, a canonical tumor suppressor gene. They went on to suggest that these extra copies of p53 could account, at least in part, for the elephants’ enhanced cancer suppression capabilities. Currently, Lisa M. Abegglen, a cell biologist at the Utah School of Medicine who contributed to the study, is leading a project to find out whether the copies of p53 have different functions.
Yet extra copies of p53 are not the elephants’ only source of protection. New work led by Vincent Lynch, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, shows that elephants and their smaller-bodied relatives (such as hyraxes, armadillos and aardvarks) also have duplicate copies of the LIF gene, which encodes for leukemia inhibitory factor. This signaling protein is normally involved in fertility and reproduction and also stimulates the growth of embryonic stem cells.
Lynch found that the 11 duplicates of LIF differ from one another but are all incomplete: At a minimum they all lack the initial block of protein-encoding information as well as a promoter sequence to regulate the activity of the gene. These deficiencies suggested to Lynch that none of the duplicates should be able to perform the normal functions of a LIF gene, or even be expressed by cells.
But when Lynch looked in cells, he found RNA transcripts from at least one of the duplicates, LIF6, which indicated that it must have a promoter sequence somewhere to turn it on. Indeed, a few thousand bases upstream of LIF6 in the genome, Lynch and his collaborators discovered a sequence of DNA that looked like a binding site for p53 protein. It suggested to them that p53 (but not any of the p53 duplicates) might be regulating the expression of LIF6. Subsequent experiments on elephant cells confirmed this hunch.
To discover what LIF6 was doing, the researchers blocked the gene’s activity and subjected the cells to DNA-damaging conditions. The result was that the cells became less likely to destroy themselves through a process called apoptosis (programmed cell death), which organisms often use as a kind of quality control system for eliminating defective tissue. LIF6 therefore seems to help eradicate potentially malignant cells. Further experiments indicated that LIF6 triggers cell death by creating leaks in the membranes around mitochondria, the vital energy-producing organelles of cells.
Lynch found that most duplicates of the LIF gene are pseudogenes — old, mutated, useless copies of genes that survive in the genome by chance. The exception, however, is the LIF6 gene sequence, which unlike the others has not accumulated random mutations, implying that natural selection is preserving it.
“We think that LIF6 is a refunctionalized pseudogene,” Lynch said. That is, the elephant LIF6 re-evolved into a functional gene from a pseudogene ancestor. Because it came back from the dead and plays a role in cell death, Lynch called it a “zombie gene.”
Although manatees and hyraxes also have extra copies of LIF, only modern and extinct elephants have LIF6, which suggests that it evolved only after the elephants branched away from those related species. And when Lynch’s group dated the origin of LIF6 by molecular clock methods, they found that the pseudogene regained a function about 30 million years ago, when the fossil record indicates that elephants were evolving large body sizes.
In summary: Elephants rarely get cancer because their cells commit suicide at the first hint of abnormality. They owe this hardiness to LIF6, a former piece of genetic junk that evolved a new function.
By protecting them against cancer, LIF6 allowed them to become giants. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-zombie-gene-protects-elephants-from-cancer?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
HOW TO SLOW DOWN TIME
~ One reason time seems to pass us by is that time seems to constrict when you encounter the familiar, and when you acquire new knowledge, it expands. “Time is this rubbery thing,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”
That relationship between time’s elasticity and whether your brain is processing new information gets at why time seems to turn up the tempo as we age. As the world becomes more familiar, we learn less, and sometimes we even seek information and experiences that fit within what we already know instead of trying new things. There’s less adventure, play, exploration, creativity, and wonder to invite and engage with newness.
So we’re not doomed to march to time’s relentless beat. Our sense of time is weird and pliable — stretching, compressing, and seemingly coming to a standstill. And we can mold our perception of time, to some extent. In other words, we can slow down time.
But if time is supposed to constrict when you’re doing something routine, then why does time seem to drag so slowly when you’re not having fun?
The answer lies in how time feels different as you’re experiencing it versus how you remember it. According to researchers Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov, routine frees up brainpower instead of fully engaging it with new information. “The automatic nature of the routine leaves attentional resources for monitoring time (the watched pot effect),” they write.
If you’ve ever worked a routine job — or actually watched a pot while waiting for water to boil — you’re intimately familiar with the watched-pot effect, where time seems to unfold at a fraction of the speed of regular time. However, change up that routine and time will seem to move faster. “A watched pot never seems to boil, but go and check your emails and it will be boiling over before you know it,” says Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.
In contrast, remembering how long something took is “a constructive process involving recall of change points,” according to Avni-Babad and Ritov. Those memory anchors of new knowledge, experiences, and events are what shape how you perceive the passage of time, which explains why time seems to speed up when we’re doing something new or interesting, such as when we’re on vacation.
Hammond calls this the “holiday paradox.” When we’re enjoying ourselves, time feels like it moves much faster than when we’re bored or anxious, but when we look back at a vacation, our assessment of time is based not on how many hours we actually spent on vacation, but on the individual new memories we created during that period.
Essentially, when we’re doing the same old thing every day, we don’t create many new memories. But on vacation, we create numerous ones because everything we’re experiencing is new. And when we look back on that period later, time will seem to have lasted much longer because of that newness.
So while the idiom may be “Time flies when you’re having fun,” luckily, when it comes to slowing your perception of time, there are better methods than simply not enjoying yourself.
HOW TO REALLY SLOW DOWN TIME: FOUR TIPS
The way you spend your time influences how you perceive it, so the choices you make now affect how you’ll manage your time later. Here are four ways to make your days richer and more memorable so that your sense of time expands and life doesn’t pass you by.
Fill Your Time with New Experiences to Counteract Routine.
As we touched on previously, routine and a lack of new experiences is what makes time appear to speed by, so it makes sense that the key to slowing down time lies in introducing novelty into our daily lives.
It’s not a new concept. In fact, psychologist William James wrote about the phenomenon of time perception in his Principles of Psychology in 1890.
James identified how the automatic nature of routines means that learning isn’t really taking place over a century before Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov tested this phenomenon. In experiments examining the perception of time in routine versus nonroutine situations, the researchers found that people remembered the duration of familiar circumstances as being shorter.
In one study, participants had to count how many times underlined numbers appeared in each row of a list of numbers and then estimate how long the task took. For the “routine” group, the underlined number was always 5, while it varied for the “nonroutine” group. Even in these simple, nearly identical tasks, the slightest novelty provided by a mix of underlined numbers rather than 5’s expanded the nonroutine group’s duration estimate.
“Unless people experience major changes that break the routine in their lives and provide them with anchors to retrieve from memory, life can become one short, timeless sequence of routine inaction,“ Avni-Babad and Ritov write.
So, to slow down time and combat the effect of routine, fill your days with new experiences and knowledge to form accessible memory anchors. Accept challenges, learn new skills, and ask questions. Take a trip or change up your environment by trying a new restaurant or coffee shop. Embrace your inner child and go exploring. Simply step outside the norm.
You’ll find that life stops passing you by so quickly when you stop underlining the same fives every day.
2. Make Meaningful Progress.
Context also makes a difference in how you perceive time because it influences what you remember. Essentially, the relevance of events can determine whether time tends more toward squishiness or stretchiness.
A 2006 study led by Gal Zauberman, from the Wharton School, provides a good example of how this works. In this experiment, participants estimated how many months had passed since the date of certain news events, such as Barack Obama’s presidential bid announcement, Britney Spears’s head-shaving, and Anna Nicole Smith’s death. Participants also had to rate whether these target events triggered subsequent developments.
The result? People underestimated the passage of time by about three months.
But if people felt that certain events triggered a greater number of subsequent events, they believed that more time had passed. Related events act as memory anchors, stretching out your sense of time, while unrelated events don’t have this effect. So if you’d been paying close attention to Obama’s first presidential campaign but didn’t follow the many public trials and tribulations of Britney Spears, you would’ve thought that more time had passed since the bid announcement — even though the two events took place within a week of each other.
Making related memories and building upon knowledge, then, can help expand time. What does that mean for you?
TO SLOW DOWN TIME, FILL IT WITH MEANINGFUL PROGRESS.
The wistfulness and disappointment you feel when life seems to speed past arise because you’re noticing the passage of yet another anniversary or birthday, but you haven’t really made any strides on the things you’ve wanted to do. The counterintuitive lesson from Zauberman’s research is that time seems to pass by quicker because you didn’t take action. So the trick to slowing down time? Simply increase your productivity, and make progress on projects and goals.
Making and recognizing progress not only builds up intrinsic motivation but also prevents you from slipping into the hollowness of automatic, forgettable routines. When you think about how you first started learning a new language or working toward a goal, like getting in shape, it seems like forever ago because you’ve made a lot of progress. There were lots of memorable milestones along the way.
3. Practice mindfulness.
There’s been a lot of talk about mindfulness in recent years, and it’s often discussed in terms of meditation. But if you’re interested in slowing down time, you don’t necessarily have to start meditating. You simply need to become more mindful.
Mindfulness essentially means that your brain is wholly focused on the task at hand. You’re fully present, aware of where you are and what you’re doing, and not overwhelmed by what’s happening around you.
That might sound easy enough, but when was the last time you were fully engrossed in only one activity? As you read this, are you also eating lunch or assembling a to-do list? When you’re driving, do you find your train of thought meandering far beyond the road before you? If you’re like most people, multitasking is a way of life. Mindfulness is the opposite.
When you’re fully engrossed in what you’re doing, when you notice the little things you may take for granted, such as the feel of your shoes as you walk, it changes the brain and can have a positive effect on the body as a whole. Studies have found that mindfulness meditation prevents the thinning of the frontal cortex.
In fact, a Harvard Medical School study found that participants in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress-reduction program experienced changes in the concentration of gray matter areas in the brain responsible for learning, memory and emotion regulation. And mindfulness has been linked to major health improvements in everything from irritable bowel syndrome and psoriasis to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
But what does practicing mindfulness mean for our perception of time? It’s essentially the tool we can use at any time to press pause, take stock of where we are, and notice both ourselves and our world.
If you’re new to mindfulness and aren’t ready to dive into meditation just yet, try the 54321 method, a common sensory-awareness grounding exercise. Here’s all you have to do:
Name five things you can see.
Name four things you can touch.
Name three things you can hear.
Name two things you can smell.
Name one thing you can taste.
After completing this exercise, you should feel calmer, more grounded, and, hopefully, more mindful.
“The more engaged we are with our experience, the longer it lasts,” writes Dr. Diana Raab. “In other words, time slows down if we pay attention, because we tend to notice more.
4. Start journaling to practice reflection
The idea of journaling may evoke memories of scribbling in a diary during middle school, but journaling can be anything you want it to be: a stream-of-consciousness flow of thoughts or simply a daily gratitude list. Regardless of how you journal, the benefits of taking time to reflect on your day are numerous — and they can help you slow down time.
“Journaling allows you to really dig into your thoughts,” writes blogger Ryan Reeves. “Journaling allows you to slow down and reflect which is key for personal growth. It will truly stop you from just going through the motions of life.”
In addition to making you more mindful, there’s also scientific evidence that journaling has other benefits. It boosts memory and communication skills, and studies have also found that consistently writing in a journal leads to a stronger immune system, better sleep, more self-confidence and even a higher I.Q.
If journaling isn’t for you, you can also reap the same time-slowing benefits by reflecting on life in other ways, whether by talking through experiences with a trusted friend or pausing to look through photographs and tapping into the emotions of past events. “One other way [to slow down time] and recall the details of experiences is to share them with others — verbally, in writing, or through photographs,” writes Dr. Raab.
Live life slowly
When you make a habit of inviting new experiences into your life, take time to celebrate your progress, and practice mindfulness, and give yourself time to reflect, you’ll create a succession of memories to look back on when you think about the passage of time. You’ll no longer feel left behind.
Though you might feel like you have less and less time, don’t mourn the fact that life’s passing you by. Instead, be proactive by spending your time thoughtfully and creating new memories.
Fill your life with new experiences and all sizes of milestones, and you’ll find that you’re marching, ambling, skipping to a slower, richer beat. Essentially, you’ve learned how to slow down time.
http://blog.idonethis.com/science-of-slowing-down-time/
Oriana:
One key seems to be to reach out for new experiences. The more non-routine things you do, the more you are going to remember what happened.
But that has been said for decades: don’t get stuck in routines! What interests me more is the point about goal-oriented activity, i.e. “Make Meaningful Progress.” Fill your time with meaningful work. Meaningful work is close to my definition of heaven.
Mary:
I think the key to slowing time is to pay attention. To almost hold your breath as you take in all that comes, savoring each small thing, noticing it, not rushing by to get somewhere else or get something done, like an arrow pointed at a target that sees nothing that it passes in its flight. It's like what happens when you read fine prose, or poetry, slowing to feel its rhythm, its sound and the way it's making sense. It's like listening to music, singing or playing, each note and phrase appreciated as part of the whole. Sometimes it's simply looking about as you move through your day, appreciating all the details. When we move through routine steps in a task we've done a thousand times time may seem to balk and stall, but later there is little to remember, time shrinks and fades. New things, new thoughts, new places, learning how to do something unfamiliar..ah, then those hours are rich and full and thick...indelible.
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ESTHER PEREL ON THE TYRANNY OF POSITIVITY, SOULMATES, THE CENTRALITY OF WORK
~ Happiness used to belong in the afterlife. In Heaven. People suffered when on earth, especially good Christians, so that they could maybe be rewarded later. This is the first time in history that you ask Western parents what they want for their children, and the first thing they say is, "I want them to be happy." They don't say, "I want them to be healthy, alive," because child mortality has gone down. They don't say, "I want them to be good people." They're supposed to talk about, "I want them to be happy.”
The tyranny of positivity is a burden. Happiness is an outcome, not a mandate, because the mandate of happiness makes you constantly have to wonder, "Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Could I be happier? Should I leave this relationship? I'm happy, but maybe I could be happier somewhere else." So it becomes, how do I know? And then it becomes massive uncertainty, massive self-doubt.
Happiness comes in a moment, where I finish an interview with you, or you with me, and maybe we say, "That was really good. I'm happy. I'm glad. I'm pleased." And then off we go. it's a moment. It's not, "I am happy in my life. I'm a happy person." I'm a person with a range of emotions.
So because we're so obsessed with happiness, we can't just say, "I'm sad,” we need to have some reason to feel sad?
That’s right. A framework that gives it permission and legitimacy. That’s the framework of trauma. That doesn't mean there are no developmental traumas—let's be very clear. Trauma is not what happened, trauma is your reaction to something that has happened over time. We've expanded the word trauma from big, terror-inducing, helplessness-inducing events, to what we call today the traumas with small t’s, which are the developmental traumas. These are super, super important. But in society, there is a direct correlation between the pressure to be happy and the release valve that comes through the trauma. I'm allowed to say that I'm not happy because I had trauma.
I think it's good that we're recognizing trauma on a larger scale, but I’m curious at what point it’s almost rendered meaningless.
In a society that mandates happiness, the suffering doesn't disappear, but you need to find a new legitimacy. So if you put it in the framework of trauma, it becomes legitimized.
You’ve offered interesting perspectives on a lot of the Western myths we have. What do you think are some of the American myths that undergird our society that were most exposed by the pandemic and by COVID?
Self-reliance, effort, optimism, "Roll up your sleeve, get to work. There is nothing you cannot solve, if you put your mind to it." This “it's all on you, try harder mentality.” A pandemic will definitely highlight the notion of interdependence. Public health is a conception of interdependence. You do something not just for you—you do something because it protects others. That notion of interdependence has taken a beating over the last [several years]. It's all self-help, self-love, self-compassion. Self is in front of a lot of things, and that ultimately ends up creating a self focus. That doesn't mean self is not important. But it also comes to self and other. It's I and thou. We don't exist separately from our connections with others.
What else?
The soulmate myth. The soulmate has always historically been God. One and only meant the divine. When you start to turn a human being into a God-like being, and you collapse the social and the spiritual, you set yourself up a little bit. Relationships are sustained by the community that they live in. Not being alone doesn't mean being two. And people here do not have enough social support, no matter which way you turn. They don’t have enough confidants, or people they talk to. Lots of things they bring to therapists should be shared in community settings. Couples don't tell the truth to anybody. Your best friends, when they may divorce, you didn't even see it coming.
The next myth, at this moment, is the centrality of work. On the one hand, work is very liberating. You come to America and if you work hard, you can make it. At the same time, when people lose their jobs, especially men, they're willing to jump off the roof. There needs to be other sources of meaning and other sources of values that isn't just about success and money and all of those things. All the research asking people what they would have wanted to do differently, not a single one says, "I would have wanted to work hard.”
So with these myths in mind, what would you advise people to do, coming out of the pandemic, to try to counteract them?
There's no greater antidepressant than doing for others. Instead of just thinking about self-care, take care of others. When you do for others, when you see other people's pain, experiences, hunger, you name it, you feel like you matter. You derive meaning when you are important to others. Your meaning doesn't just come from what you do for yourself.
In terms of the soulmate, one person cannot give you what an entire community should provide. That is bound to create a crumbling of too many expectations on one unit. So do not give up your friends. A wedding is not saying goodbye to your circle or to these relationships. They're super important, and especially the men. The men, particularly guys in straight relationships, lose massive amounts of social connections once they get married. But this is for people in all types of relationships. One person cannot give you what a whole village should provide.
Then for work, work as identity is where it's going. Love and work are replacing traditional communal structures and religion. But think about other sources of purpose and meaning, and put them in place. What else matters in your life? If it's only work, when work doesn't go well, mental health problems are very close around the corner. ~
https://www.gq.com/story/esther-perel-interview?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE EARTH SEEMS TO HAVE A 27.5 MILLION YEAR HEARTBEAT
~ A new study of ancient geological events suggests that our planet has a slow, steady 'heartbeat' of geological activity every 27 million years or so.
This pulse of clustered geological events - including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganizations and sea level rises - is incredibly slow, a 27.5-million-year cycle of catastrophic ebbs and flows. But luckily for us, the research team notes we have another 20 million years before the next ‘pulse'.
"Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time," said Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist and the study's lead author.
"But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random.”
The team conducted new analysis on the ages of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years.
"These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations," the team writes in their paper.
"Our results suggest that global geologic events are generally correlated, and seem to come in pulses with an underlying ~27.5-million-year cycle.”
Geologists have been investigating a potential cycle in geological events for a long time. Back in the 1920s and 30s, scientists of the era had suggested that the geological record had a 30-million-year cycle, while in the 1980s and 90s researchers used the best-dated geological events at the time to give them a range of the length between 'pulses' of 26.2 to 30.6 million years.
Now, everything seems to be in order – 27.5 million years is right about where we'd expect. A study late last year by the same authors suggested that this 27.5-million-year mark is when mass extinctions happen, too.
A 2018 paper, by two researchers at the University of Sydney, looked at Earth's carbon cycle and plate tectonics, and also came to the conclusion that the cycle is approximately 26 million years long.
Collins explained that in this latest study, many of the events the team looked at are causal - meaning that one directly causes the other, thus some of the 89 events are related: for example, anoxic events causing marine extinction.
"Having said this," he added, "this 26-30 million year cyclicity does seem to be real and over a longer period of time – it also is not clear what is the underlying cause of it!”
Other research from Rampino and his team have suggested comet strikes could be the cause, with one space researcher even suggesting Planet X is to blame.
But if Earth really does have a geologic 'heartbeat', it might be due to something a little closer to home.
"These cyclic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and mantle plumes, or might alternatively be paced by astronomical cycles associated with the Earth's motions in the Solar System and the Galaxy," the team writes in their study. ~
https://www.sciencealert.com/our-planet-has-a-27-5-million-year-old-pulse-says-study-we-don-t-know-what-causes-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I know that most of us are not geologists, and don't think in terms of millions of years. But it's a lesson in humility to realize that there are these large forces at work, beyond both human wisdom and foolishness.
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COLD CLIMATES CORRELATE WITH LARGER BODY SIZE
~ Big bodies are good for cold places.
That's the gist of a foundational rule in ecology that has been around since the mid-1800s: Animals that live in colder places tend to have larger bodies, especially birds and mammals that need to regulate their body temperatures. For example, some of the largest whale and bear species have evolved in the coldest reaches of the planet.
The rule applies broadly to modern humans too. Populations that evolved in colder places generally have bigger bodies.
That's also true of human ancestors, a new study finds. The research offers conclusive evidence that human body size and climate are historically connected.
In general, our ancient relatives got much larger as they evolved. "Over the last million years, you see that body size changes by about 50% and brain size actually triples, which is a lot," explains Andrea Manica, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Cambridge. "And there have been all sorts of theories about what might have underpinned those two big changes in size."
Manica and a team of paleontologists and climate scientists in Germany and the United Kingdom set out to test one of those theories: that the local climate was driving brain and body growth. They examined about 300 fossils of human ancestors collected in Europe, Asia and Africa, and they used the same basic climate data that scientists use to predict future climate change to estimate instead temperature and precipitation over the last million years.
"We reconstructed climate back in time so we could say what the climate was when that specimen was alive," Manica says.
The researchers found that human ancestors and Neanderthals living in colder places generally had larger bodies. Past studies suggested this might be true but didn't assemble such broad evidence. For one thing, past research often relied on rough global estimates of the past climate, whereas this new study estimates what each human ancestor would have experienced in their region.
The new findings are "reasonably convincing," says Mark Collard, who studies human evolution at Simon Fraser University in Canada and who was not involved in the study. However, he suspects that the new analysis may overstate the relationship between temperature and body size because of uncertainties in both the fossil record and the climate data.
The authors of the new study also found that the rapid increase in human brain size over the last million years was not strongly correlated with climate. "For brains, you need other explanations," says Manica, perhaps such as diet or social structures.
For decades, scientists who study human evolution have posited that what our ancestors ate — whether it was cooked or raw, whether it included meat or only vegetables — influenced how our brains evolved. It's also possible that more complex social structures and group communication are linked to brain growth in human ancestors.
"I suspect that social factors such as group size are more likely to influence brain size," Collard says.
Modern humans need not worry that the new findings about body size and climate will show up in our daily lives.
The Earth is getting steadily hotter because of human-caused climate change. But human body size will not shrink as a result, at least not in the near future.
That's because it takes many, many generations for humans to evolve. The average human generation is about 30 years, so it would take hundreds or even thousands of years of sustained warming before human body size changed in reaction to global warming. And, even then, the changes would be very slight — about 1 kilogram per 2 degrees Celsius of warming, Manica says.
"We're not going to shrink tomorrow," he says. "That's the good news. But climate change is problematic for many other reasons.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/08/1014180079/colder-climates-meant-bigger-bodies-for-ancient-humans
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HOW DIFFERENT RELIGIONS MIGHT HANDLE ENCOUNTERS WITH ALIENS
Judaism
There are a few reasons to believe that Judaism would outlast a first encounter. Since Jews believe there are no limits on the power of God, they are open to the idea that God is free to create more than one form of sentient species in the cosmos. Also, Rabbi Norman Lamm recently proposed that Judaism “can very well accept a scientific finding that man is not the only intelligent and bio-spiritual resident in God’s world,” because “Man’s non-singularity does not imply his insignificance.” From Lamm’s theological perspective, humans might not be the focal point of God’s universe, but they still have a purpose.
Jews would also not bother to proselytize ET. Twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides held that the righteous of all nations and faiths will earn a place in heaven. On this basis, Jews would assume that ET will decide for itself how and whether to worship God.
Seventh-day Adventism
Seventh-day Adventism emerged in the 19th century in part as a solution to theological problems stemming from the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The prophetess, Ellen White, described visions of extraterrestrial beings in different worlds that were “tall, majestic people” and entirely without sin. These visions inform the religion’s bedrock belief that since aliens are not affected by original sin, they do not need Christian redemption.
Of course, a serious problem could emerge if ET turns out to be evil. In this case, White’s prophecies might be seen as false, and Seventh-day Adventism would either need to find a way to adjust or vanish into history.
Creationists
Most fundamentalist Christians are committed to a literal interpretation of scripture. Since there is no mention of extraterrestrials in the Bible, they conclude that this proves the absence of any such beings in the universe. For this reason, first contact with an alien would obviously generate a major headache for Creationists.
Creationists deny the theory of evolution, and the discovery of simple or intelligent life on other planets probably won’t cause them to reconsider its validity. Perhaps they would embrace the idea that an all-powerful God created more than one intelligent species in the universe without resort to evolution and simply chose not to tell us about this aspect of God’s plans. But this view depends upon a non-literal interpretation of scripture.
If ET lands on Earth, denying its existence will become virtually impossible. For Creationism to remain viable, its followers will need to accept divergent views on a wide range of scriptural matters.
Roman Catholicism
Many Roman Catholic leaders take the possible existence of aliens seriously, and they tend to agree that ET is sinful. Yet they disagree on why ET is sinful and whether he should attend Roman Catholic Mass if he lands on Earth.
In the first half of the 20th century, Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested that original sin didn’t arise from the errors of two humans on Earth, but instead permeates the entire universe. He also suggested that Christ on Earth offers no redemptive value for any other beings anywhere else in the cosmos, and so aliens visiting Earth would not benefit from embracing Christianity. But Teilhard believed that Christ could become incarnate on different worlds, in forms appropriate for those places and beings. These other saviors could establish Christian-like local belief systems that provide opportunities for the redemption and salvation of those alien populations.
Teilhard’s writings have never become mainstream and have been suppressed since 1962. In contrast, the ideas of Brother Guy Consolmagno, a professional astronomer and a Jesuit who works for the Vatican Observatory, better reflect current Roman Catholic views on ET.
Consolmagno believes that finding ET would not pose a problem for Roman Catholicism. He argues that there is only one Christ—the one who lived and died and was resurrected on Earth 2,000 years ago. If other beings in the universe suffer from original sin, then they will benefit from the life and resurrection of Christ on Earth. This theological approach also makes Roman Catholicism a universal religion and Earth the most important place in the universe.
If Consolmagno’s views continue to be popular, Roman Catholic leaders might be compelled to convert ET at the first opportunity. This may also cause the minority members who agree with Teilhard to separate from the church.
Islam
Those of the Muslim faith might not be surprised by news of ET’s existence, particularly if ET is sentient. In fact, Islamic scripture seems to make the case that intelligent life forms exist on many other worlds. The Qur’an states that all of the beings in the universe serve Allah, who “does take an account of them all, and hath numbered them all exactly. And every one of them will come to Him singly on the Day of Judgment.” A number of scholars agree that these beings are not angels, because the word da’bbah translates to mean a living, breathing creature that walks on the ground; it does not fly and it is not a spirit.
Many Muslims believe that Islam forbids proselytizing. But several Islamic groups think the testimony of faith for Muslims, “There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God,” implies that those who are not Muslims threaten their faith, and so non-Muslims must be converted. On this basis, we can expect that numerous Muslims will wish to convert ET to Islam.
Buddhism
Buddhists view the universe as unimaginably large, ancient, and filled with living beings everywhere. Within this universe, reincarnation allows a soul to endlessly transmigrate upward or downward through the multiple levels of living beings. At the moment of death, reincarnation also permits a soul to slip away from a body in one part of the universe and be reborn into a different body in another part of the universe. The very existence of ET is built into the Buddhist worldview, and so an alien presence wouldn’t pose a challenge to its core principles.
There are a number of reasons why Buddhists would not actively seek to convert ET to Buddhism. The tenets of Buddhism include not blindly following any person or idea, and a Buddhist cannot ask another person to follow Buddhism without that person first gaining a rational understanding of Buddhist principles. Also, most Buddhists accept that their way is not the only path to enlightenment.
Can we draw any lessons from a close examination of religious doctrine about what might happen to religion upon first contact? Yes. The old adage “the theology that marries the science of today will be the widow of tomorrow” is likely true. Most major religions that embrace ET or have shown the flexibility to adapt to new knowledge will probably survive, while more stubborn faiths will face greater challenges. As we have seen, Seventh-day Adventism, Creationism, and Roman Catholicism might face some special challenges.
If history is any guide, the transition won’t be painless. Many times in the past, our religious leaders have been forced to wrestle with major scientific discoveries. Four centuries ago, when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo demonstrated that Earth was not the center of the universe, Roman Catholicism and the emerging protestant denominations almost all condemned this idea. While almost everyone today accepts the Copernican view, a lot of damage was inflicted in the 17th century in the name of preserving religious tradition. Despite the turmoil and human cost, the religious institutions themselves survived, though they have also splintered and spawned new religions. We might see the same thing happen today.
History has also shown us that many religions don’t hold back to invite or even force non-believers into the fold. The efforts by European colonists and Islamic armies to convert native peoples to Christianity and Islam have an oppressive, bloody history. A similar future could unfold in which one or more of our major religious groups attempts to convert aliens.
Then again, the greatest religious impact of first contact could be a newfound understanding of ourselves. Perhaps confronting the fact that we are not unique and our planet is not the only one to harbor life will encourage us to let go of the notion that we are superior to others and that an individual human’s personal worth in the eyes of the God is not diminished if ET does not follow the same religious practices as you and me. Is it possible that learning of alien life will encourage us to tolerate the religious beliefs of our fellow humans, too? One can hope. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-will-our-religions-handle-the-discovery-of-alien-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
This article fails to consider the possibility that the aliens might turn out to be the future conquistadors, and attempt to convert humans to their particular religion. But I don't foresee it. First, the obstacles to space travel remain huge, all sci-fi movies aside. Second, if enormously technologically advanced aliens were indeed to arrive, they would most likely be scientists, preoccupied with the mysteries of nature. They would not resemble Jehovah's Witnesses, going door to door to spread the news that the end of the world is imminent.
On the other hand, such aliens might have an advanced philosophy of life that might be of interest to humans. Perhaps they worship beauty adn the arts. But some of them might have a different focus. Let's face it, we have enough diversity right here on earth, and rather than waste time speculating about aliens, we need to make sure we don't destroy this beautiful planet.
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Jeremy Sherman:
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THE GUT BACTERIA AND THE BRAIN
Some of the most intriguing work has been done on autism. For decades, doctors, parents, and researchers have noted that about three-quarters of people with autism also have some gastrointestinal abnormality, like digestive issues, food allergies, or gluten sensitivity. This recognition led scientists to examine potential connections between gut microbes and autism; several recent studies have found that autistic people’s microbiome differs significantly from control groups. The California Institute of Technology microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian has focused on a common species called Bacteroides fragilis, which is seen in smaller quantities in some children with autism. In a paper published two years ago in the journal Cell, Mazmanian and several colleagues fed B. fragilis from humans to mice with symptoms similar to autism. The treatment altered the makeup of the animals’ microbiome, and more importantly, improved their behavior: They became less anxious, communicated more with other mice, and showed less repetitive behavior.
Exactly how the microbes interact with the illness—whether as a trigger or as a shield—remains mostly a mystery. But Mazmanian and his colleagues have identified one possible link: a chemical called 4-ethylphenylsulphate, or 4EPS, which seems to be produced by gut bacteria. They’ve found that mice with symptoms of autism have blood levels of 4EPS more than 40 times higher than other mice. The link between 4EPS levels and the brain isn’t clear, but when the animals were injected with the compound, they developed autism-like symptoms.
Mazmanian, who in 2012 was awarded a MacArthur grant for his microbiome work, sees this as a “potential breakthrough” in understanding how microbes contribute to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. He says the results so far suggest that adjusting gut bacteria could be a viable treatment for the disease, at least in some patients. “We may be able to reverse these ailments,” he says. “If you turn off the faucet that produces this compound, then the symptoms disappear. That’s what we see in the mouse model.”
Scientists have also gathered evidence that gut bacteria can influence anxiety and depression. Stephen Collins, a gastroenterology researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has found that strains of two bacteria, lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, reduce anxiety-like behavior in mice (scientists don’t call it “anxiety” because you can’t ask a mouse how it’s feeling). Humans also carry strains of these bacteria in their guts. In one study, he and his colleague collected gut bacteria from a strain of mice prone to anxious behavior, and then transplanted these microbes into another strain inclined to be calm. The result: The tranquil animals appeared to become anxious.
Overall, both of these microbes seem to be major players in the gut-brain axis. John Cryan, a neuroscientist at the University College of Cork in Ireland, has examined the effects of both of them on depression in animals. In a 2010 paper published in Neuroscience, he gave mice either bifidobacterium or the antidepressant Lexapro; he then subjected them to a series of stressful situations, including a test which measured how long they continued to swim in a tank of water with no way out. (They were pulled out after a short period of time, before they drowned.) The microbe and the drug were both effective at increasing the animals’ perseverance, and reducing levels of hormones linked to stress. Another experiment, this time using lactobacillus, had similar results. Cryan is launching a study with humans (using measurements other than the forced swim test to gauge subjects’ response).
So far, most microbiome-based brain research has been in mice. But there have already been a few studies involving humans. Last year, for example, Collins transferred gut bacteria from anxious humans into “germ-free” mice—animals that had been raised (very carefully) so their guts contained no bacteria at all. After the transplant, these animals also behaved more anxiously.
Other research has examined entire humans, not just their bugs. A paper published in the May 2015 issue of Psychopharmacology by the Oxford University neurobiologist Phil Burnet looked at whether a prebiotic—a group of carbohydrates that provide sustenance for gut bacteria—affected stress levels among a group of 45 healthy volunteers. Some subjects were fed 5.5 grams of a powdered carbohydrate known as galactooligosaccharide, or GOS, while others were given a placebo. Previous studies in mice by the same scientists had shown that this carb fostered growth of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria; the mice with more of these microbes also had increased levels of several neurotransmitters that affect anxiety, including one called brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
In this experiment, subjects who ingested GOS showed lower levels of a key stress hormone, cortisol, and in a test involving a series of words flashed quickly on a screen, the GOS group also focused more on positive information and less on negative. This test is often used to measure levels of anxiety and depression, since in these conditions anxious and depressed patients often focus inordinately on the threatening or negative stimuli. Burnet and his colleagues note that the results are similar to those seen when subjects take anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications.
Perhaps the most well-known human study was done by Mayer, the UCLA researcher. He recruited 25 subjects, all healthy women; for four weeks, 12 of them ate a cup of commercially available yogurt twice a day, while the rest didn’t. Yogurt is a probiotic, meaning it contains live bacteria, in this case strains of four species, bifidobacterium, streptococcus, lactococcus, and lactobacillus. Before and after the study, subjects were given brain scans to gauge their response to a series of images of facial expressions—happiness, sadness, anger, and so on.
To Mayer’s surprise, the results, which were published in 2013 in the journal Gastroenterology, showed significant differences between the two groups; the yogurt eaters reacted more calmly to the images than the control group. “The contrast was clear,” says Mayer. “This was not what we expected, that eating a yogurt twice a day for a few weeks would do something to your brain.” He thinks the bacteria in the yogurt changed the makeup of the subjects’ gut microbes, and that this led to the production of compounds that modified brain chemistry.
It’s not yet clear how the microbiome alters the brain. Most researchers agree that microbes probably influence the brain via multiple mechanisms. Scientists have found that gut bacteria produce neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and GABA, all of which play a key role in mood (many antidepressants increase levels of these same compounds). Certain organisms also affect how people metabolize these compounds, effectively regulating the amount that circulates in the blood and brain. Gut bacteria may also generate other neuroactive chemicals, including one called butyrate, that have been linked to reduced anxiety and depression. Cryan and others have also shown that some microbes can activate the vagus nerve, the main line of communication between the gut and the brain. In addition, the microbiome is intertwined with the immune system, which itself influences mood and behavior.
This interconnection of bugs and brain seems credible, too, from an evolutionary perspective. After all, bacteria have lived inside humans for millions of years. Cryan suggests that over time, at least a few microbes have developed ways to shape their hosts’ behavior for their own ends. Modifying mood is a plausible microbial survival strategy, he argues that “happy people tend to be more social. And the more social we are, the more chances the microbes have to exchange and spread.”
As scientists learn more about how the gut-brain microbial network operates, Cryan thinks it could be hacked to treat psychiatric disorders. “These bacteria could eventually be used the way we now use Prozac or Valium,” he says. And because these microbes have eons of experience modifying our brains, they are likely to be more precise and subtle than current pharmacological approaches, which could mean fewer side effects. “I think these microbes will have a real effect on how we treat these disorders,” Cryan says. “This is a whole new way to modulate brain function.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-gut-bacteria-change-brain-function
on the same subject:
~ The study that ignited the whole concept took place at Kyushu University in Japan.
The researchers showed that "germ-free" mice - those that never came into contact with microbes - pumped out twice the amount of stress hormone when distressed than normal mice.
The animals were identical except for their microbes. It was a strong hint that the difference was a result of their micro-organisms.
"We all go back to that first paper for the first wave of neuroscientists considering microbes," says Dr Jane Foster, a neuropsychiatrist at McMaster University in Canada.
"That really was very powerful for those of us who were studying depression and anxiety."
It was the first hint of microbial medicine in mental health.
The brain is the most complex object in the known universe so how could it be reacting to bacteria in the gut?
One route is the vagus nerve, it's an information superhighway connecting the brain and the gut.
Bacteria break down fiber in the diet into chemicals called short-chain fatty acids, which can have effects throughout the body.
The microbiome influences the immune system, which has also been implicated in brain disorders.
There is even emerging evidence that gut bugs could be using tiny strips of genetic code called microRNAs to alter how DNA works in nerve cells.
There is now a rich vein of research linking germ-free mice with changes in behavior and even the structure of the brain.
But their completely sterile upbringing is nothing like the real world. We're constantly coming into contact with microbes in our environment, none of us are germ-free.
At Cork University Hospital, Prof. Ted Dinan is trying to uncover what happens to the microbiome in his depressed patients.
A good rule of thumb is a healthy microbiome is a diverse microbiome, containing a wide variety of different species living all over our bodies.
Prof. Dinan says: "If you compare somebody who is clinically depressed with someone who is healthy, there is a narrowing in the diversity of the microbiota.
"I'm not suggesting it is the sole cause of depression, but I do believe for many individuals it does play a role in the genesis of depression."
And he argues some lifestyles that weaken our gut bacteria, such as a diet low in fiber, can make us more vulnerable.
You're more microbe than human - if you count all the cells in your body, only 43% are human
The rest is our microbiome and includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and single-celled archaea
The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.
But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out at between two million and 20 million microbial genes. It's known as the second genome and is linked to diseases including allergy, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's, the effectiveness of cancer drugs, and even depression and autism
It's an intriguing concept - that an imbalance in the gut microbiome could be involved in depression.
So scientists at the APC Microbiome center, at University College Cork, started transplanting the microbiome from depressed patients to animals. It's known in the biz as a trans-poo-sion.
It showed that if you transfer the bacteria, you transfer the behavior too.
Prof. John Cryan told the BBC: "We were very surprised that you could, by just taking microbiome samples, reproduce many of the features of a depressed individual in a rat."
This included anhedonia - the way depression can lead to people losing interest in what they normally find pleasurable.
For the rats, that was sugary water they could not get enough of, yet "when they were given the microbiome from a depressed individual, they no longer cared", says Prof. Cryan.
Similar evidence - linking the microbiome, the gut and the brain - is emerging in Parkinson's disease.
It is clearly a brain disorder. Patients lose control over their muscles as brain cells die and it leads to a characteristic tremor.
But Prof. Sarkis Mazmanian, a medical microbiologist from Caltech, is building the case that gut bacteria are involved.
"Classical neuroscientists would find this as heresy to think you can understand events in the brain by researching the gut," he says.
He has found "very powerful" differences between the microbiomes of people with Parkinson's and those without the disease.
Studies in animals, genetically hardwired to develop Parkinson's, show gut bacteria were necessary for the disease to emerge.
And when stool was transplanted from Parkinson's patients to those mice, they developed "much worse" symptoms than using faeces sourced from a healthy individual.
Prof. Mazmanian told the BBC: "The changes in the microbiome appear to be driving the motor symptoms, appear to be causal to the motor symptoms.
"We're very excited about this because it allows us to target the microbiome as an avenue for new therapies."
The evidence linking the microbiome and the brain is as fascinating as it is early.
But the pioneers of this field see an exciting prospect on the horizon - a whole new way of influencing our health and wellbeing.
If microbes do influence our brains then maybe we can change our microbes for the better.
Can altering the bacteria in Parkinson's patients' guts change the course of their disease?
There is talk of psychiatrists prescribing mood microbes or psychobiotics - effectively a probiotic cocktail of healthy bacteria - to boost our mental health.
Dr Kirsten Tillisch, at University of California, Los Angeles, told me: "If we change the bacteria can we change the way we respond?
But she says we need far bigger studies that really probe what species, and even sub-species, of bacteria may be exerting an effect on the brain and what products they are making in the gut.
Dr Tillisch said: "There's clearly connections here, I think our enthusiasm and our excitement is there because we haven't had great treatments.
"It's very exciting to think there's a whole new pathway that we can study and we can look and we can help people, maybe even prevent disease."
And that's the powerful idea here.
The microbiome - our second genome - is opening up an entirely new way of doing medicine and its role is being investigated in nearly every disease you can imagine including allergies, cancer and obesity.
I've been struck by how malleable the second genome is and how that is in such stark contrast to our own DNA.
The food we eat, the pets we have, the drugs we take, how we're born… all alter our microbial inhabitants.
And if we're doing that unwittingly, imagine the potential of being able to change our microbiome for the better.
Prof. Cryan said: "I predict in the next five years when you go to your doctor for your cholesterol testing etc, you'll also get your microbiome assessed.
"The microbiome is the fundamental future of personalized medicine." ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-bacteria-are-changing-your-mood?utm_source=pocket-newtab&fbclid=IwAR1RePP_fXURUK56HgG0POVbIDatfULY4FN1lgjrY--8fI6r6fddO0HuDMA
Oriana:
These studies are not flawless. In the case of yogurt, for instance, it could be argued that other nutrients, such as calcium and magnesium, have a more significant calming effect. The field of microbiome studies is new and a great deal of research is needed.
Is there anything that the average person can do? There is only one word I can say to you: fiber. The good bacteria thrive in people who consume a lot of vegetables, especially beans and other legumes (and don't forget the avocado, which is actually a fruit: it's packed with fiber).
ending on beauty:
O Beauty, out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child,
But when have I been sure as now
That no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end?
~ Sara Teasdale, August Moonrise
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