Author Archives: Wil

About Wil

A groovy guy thinking deep thoughts.

Brain chemicals and loyalty cards

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When I read Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience book “Decartes’ Error” several years ago I was struck with a certain revelation. Damasio made the point that the subtle fluctuations of our emotional life are tied to physiological processes. A sting a fear is correlated to the activation of the amygdala and corresponding hormone releases. Similar processes drive other emotions and sensations like serenity, sleepiness and ecstasy. They are fired off by the release of chemicals within our bodies.

It’s fascinating to think about this but you don’t see the concept mentioned much in non-science writing. Thus I was pleasantly surprised at this passage on author Hugh Howey’s blog. While discussing Barnes and Nobel’s use of “loyalty cards” (basically a tool to provide discounts to frequent buyers) he states…

Loyalty cards are another issue. These cost a yearly subscription, and being asked if you have one right at the moment of transactional copulation is a buzz-kill. Dreading the pressure of signing up is a great way to block the dopamine release that might get me to come back.

Dopamin is the neurotransmitter related to anticipation.

I have to say I agree with Howey’s larger point about these kinds of membership programs. I’ve pretty given up on ever shopping at a Von’s Supermarket as every time I do they try and force membership into their stupid loyalty card program. I’m curious whether these programs ultimately drive away more customers than they keep. Albertsons, another store around here, has actually discontinued their program.

The crimes of animals

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I recently came across discussion of the fact that, in medieval times, animals were often put on trial for various crimes. This web page describes such occurrences in detail and includes this delightfully grisly anecdote.

Such was the case on June 14, 1494, when a pig was arrested for having “strangled and defaced a young child in its cradle, the son of Jehan Lenfant, a cowherd on the fee-farm of Clermont, and of Gillon his wife.” During the trial, several witnesses explained that “on the morning of Easter Day, as the father was guarding the cattle and his wife Gillon was absent in the village of Dizy, the infant being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time the said house and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child, which, in consequence of the bites and defacements inflicted by the said pig, departed this life.”

After listening to the evidence, the judge read out his verdict: “We, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced, pronounced and appointed, that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood near and adjoining to the gallows and high place of execution …”

The pig ate a face! I feel a little less guilty about eating bacon.

Nothingness

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As astute readers are doubtless aware, I recently posted a post entitled “What is Real?” in which I posited that most everything we encounter does not exist. My point wasn’t that physical matter doesn’t exist (though maybe it doesn’t) but that the objects we group matter into are not objectively real but are formed from subjective, man-made categories. So the atoms and molecules* that make up a cup, or a cat, or a hat exist, but the objects—cups, cats, and hats—are dependent on humans for their existence.

*Of course, “atoms” and “molecules” are themselves man made categories.

Todays I stumbled unto an interesting rumination by someone named Alan Lightman. He’s titled his piece “My Own Personal Nothingness” and uses it to explore this “nothing is real” conceit. At one point he argues that institutions—churches, organizations, governmental bodies, political parties—are not real. They, as everything else, exist only in the minds of men.

Likewise, our human-made institutions. We endow our art and our cultures and our codes of ethics and our laws with a grand and everlasting existence. We give these institutions an authority that extends far beyond ourselves. But in fact, all of these are constructions of our minds. That is, these institutions and codes and their imputed meanings are all consequences of exchanges between neurons, which in turn are simply material atoms. They are all mental constructions. They have no reality other than that which we give them, individually and collectively.

This might seem an innocuous, even boring statement but, as I’ve argued elsewhere, this has huge ramifications for morality. In modern society, if you commit an evil act, you are (hopefully) caught and placed in prison. But if our institutions of law and morality are mere figments of our imagination, how do we know how to objectively separate right from wrong?

But there’s also something a bit freeing about the notion that institutions are meaningless. It means that we really don’t owe institutions any fealty, that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with them. I know a lot of people who defer greatly to their political party (and roundly condemn anyone who doesn’t support their party) and when a politician of that party is caught in a wrongdoing—say, fornicating with a goat—it pains these people. But these institutions only have the power we give them. I used to be much more deferential to academics or doctors and the institutions they represent, but I now see they’re taking guesses about how life works, just like the rest of us. (I don’t want to overplay this statement—I defer to doctors more than astrologers, but I recognize they aren’t perfect.)

Anyway, Lightman’s short piece is worth reading as are the comments it has generated.

Stanley Jordan’s new look

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Stanley Jordan is an interesting guitarist who first appeared on the jazz scene decades ago—early eighties I think. He made a splash with an interesting technique for playing as one plays a piano—he used both hands to tap notes on the fretboard. It was similar to Van Halen’s two handed tapping but its own kind of monster. I’ve owned a few of albums of Jordan’s and saw him live once and he’s very impressive.

I stumbled across this recent interview with Jordan. It caught my attention partly because Jordan clearly is a hyper intelligent fellow with a lot of diverse interests. But also, it’s pretty clear that he’s openly acknowledging being gay or transgendered or some combination thereof. (He doesn’t actually say this, but his appearance, affectation and shots of him performing in more flamboyant attire would seem to make it clear.) I find myself wondering whether the fact that he created a very unique a revolutionary guitar style is in some way related to the fact that he’s not tied down to a traditional sense of self. Like, on some level he’s innately so outside the box (gender-role-wise) that he feels free to throw the box out the window (in terms of his playing.)

I could be totally wrong about this, I suppose, but compare images of Jordan in years past with as he appears today I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The interviewer seems like a dullard and early on confuses the word “chorus” for “chords.”

Musical dissonance

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I was thinking the other day about the topic of musical dissonance. Dissonance is a somewhat relative term—some people hear a piece of music and consider it sharply dissonant, others less so—but there’s some general agreement. Few would argue that there’s not a lot of dissonance in Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes soundtrack.

I know some people who are really averse to musical dissonance. I know others, like myself, who don’t find dissonance particularly perturbing. It struck me that a lot of the people I know who dislike dissonance tend to be clean freaks – they’re unusually repulsed by bugs, filth and such. I wonder of there’s some correlation – is their distaste of dissonance (a kind of musical filth) related to their fear of general filth?

There’s some research into the neuroscience of all this. I found this essay online that synopsizes some of it.

A recent experiment dealt with this problem by attempting to minimize subjectivity, by measuring responses to dissonance. (1) Dissonance can consistently create feelings of unpleasantness in a subject, even if the subject has never heard the music before. Music of varying dissonance was played for the subjects, while their cerebral blood flow was measured. Increased blood flow in a specific area of the brain corresponded with increased activity. It was found that the varying degrees of dissonance caused increased activity in the paralimbic regions of the brain, which are associated with emotional processes.

Another recent experiment measured the activity in the brain while subjects were played previously-chosen musical pieces which created feelings of intense pleasure for them. (2) The musical pieces had an intrinsic emotional value for the subjects, and no memories or other associations attached to them. Activity was seen in the reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal areas of the brain. This result was interesting partly because these areas are associated with the pleasure induced by food, sex, and drugs of abuse, which would imply a connection between such pleasure and the pleasure induced by music.

BTW – here’s that Planet of the Apes. Brilliant stuff – I love the weird percussion bit around 6:35.

What is real?

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Science writer Nicholas Wade recently wrote a book about the role of race in the development of human culture. According to his thesis, the different races possess more or less of certain collections of genes and some of these genes are responsible for human behavior therefore certain races are genetically predisposed towards certain behaviors*. This is controversial because it implies that races can’t change and efforts to help them do so may be doomed to failure.

* Summarizing Wade’s full argument is close to impossible and I’m sure people could niggle with how I’m describing it here.

Many people disagree with Wade’s theory and one frequent rebuttal is that race itself doesn’t exist—it is, they say, a “social construct.” By this they mean the division of race has no real meaning in nature. For example, the term species divides animal groups who can’t reproduce with each other. In that sense, species is a real term. But race is much harder to define. Different races (called sub-species by people who debate this stuff) can have sex with each other. One might point out the differences of skin color and appearance between different races but that gets messy quickly. There are plenty of light skinned blacks or Asian looking Caucasians etc.

In this sense, I agree that race is a social construct. But, as you think about it, so is pretty much everything. Words have meaning because enough of us got together and agreed they have meaning. If we didn’t all agree that a cup was a cup and that its purpose was to hold things to drink, it wouldn’t be a cup. If everyone on earth died then cups would no longer exist. They might exist in the sense that their matter would still exist (assuming the earth wasn’t destroyed or what have you) but as an object—a category—cups would be extinct. The definition of cups is a man-made distinction that has no objective meaning.

(Of course, definitions are kind of blurry. Some people might look at a tall cup and claim it’s a flower vase. And we also hear about weird German words that have no translation in English.)

This reminds me of a few tidbits I’ve read in relation to Buddhist thought. There is a notion there that you can experience an object before you apply all the man-made definitions and correlations related to it. I suppose we all do this for a nanosecond before we mentally identify an object. For the briefest of moment, before you identify a cup, you experience it as some undefined thing. (This moment is so fast it’s questionable whether you can say you “experience it” but there you have it.)

Watching my dad and his wife, both in their 90s, I see a certain breakdown of this system of categories, this taxonomy, that we apply to everything around us. They might be baffled by what a fairly basic object is, or they might understand it but mislabel it; there’s a lot of calling things with words that rhyme with the real name—cup could become pup for example. I suppose this is what life was like when we were babies—everything was just a thing, and often we probably couldn’t even differentiate between things. A newspaper next to an apple next to a kitten was just a pile of “stuff” in our new minds.

This leads to an interesting point. What babies and demented people have in common are essentially brains that don’t categorize well. The neurons of their brains have limited connections (either because the connections haven’t formed yet as in the case of babies, or because they have deteriorated as in the case of older adults.) This would imply that the meaning we apply to the objects we encounter is literally wired into our brains. It’s the structure of our brains that applies meaning. From this one can presume that a brain structured differently would find different meanings in the world. (Say the brain of an autistic child. Or an alien. Or a sentient computer.)

It really leads to the question of “what is real.” Our words are not real. Our categories are not real. The only thing really real that I can see is the physical matter of the universe. Even the distinctions between these bits of matter (e.g. molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks etc.) are not really real.

This is heavy shit to think about. It’s giving me a headache.

Hooray for salt?

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You may have heard the recent allegation that saturated fat, long thought to be evil, is actually fine. (This NY Times op-ed has details.) Along with red wine, coffee and chocolate, saturated fat seems to be another substance that the medical and diet industries got wrong for years.

When the revised opinion of saturated fats hit the news, I passed it on to several people in conversation. They would usually say something like, “Oh, so it’s ok for me to eat pepperoni pizza?” I would have to warn them, “That food is high in salt and salt is still bad.”

Except, maybe not. Peruse this NY Times editorial.

The current average sodium consumption in the United States is about 3,400 milligrams per day. This is mostly ingested in processed foods and is equivalent to the amount of sodium in about 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Dietary guidelines endorsed by the federal government and leading medical groups recommend reducing the average to 2,300 milligrams for the general population and 1,500 for groups deemed at greater risk, like adults older than 50, African-Americans, people with high blood pressure and diabetics, among others.

There is considerable evidence that lowering sodium can reduce blood pressure, but there is scant evidence that reducing blood pressure from levels that are not clearly high will necessarily reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and death.

Previous studies have found little evidence to support those low recommended sodium targets. Now a large study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, which tracked more than 100,000 people from 17 countries on five continents, has found that the safest levels of sodium consumption are between 3,000 and 6,000 milligrams.

My dad is on a 1500 milligram a day limit. Should I be worried that it’s too low? Maybe.

Other studies have found that very low levels of sodium can disrupt biochemical systems that are essential to human health or trigger hormones that raise cardiovascular risks.

To be fair, as the article states, the science is not settled here. But given that the track record of the health nannies is becoming more and more dubious I think an extra slice of pizza is justifiable.

Happy hospitals?

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Many, many times here have I commented on my belief that pain has a significant emotional component. And, as I make my way in the world, I often see little clues supporting this thesis. For instance, today’s NY Times has an article on an effort to redesign hospital rooms to be more pleasent. One hospital first set up a test room to try out some happier designs.

After months of testing, patients in the model room rated food and nursing care higher than patients in the old rooms did, although the meals and care were the same.

But the real eye-opener was this: Patients also asked for 30 percent less pain medication.

Reduced pain has a cascade effect, hastening recovery and rehabilitation, leading to shorter stays and diminishing not just costs but also the chances for accidents and infections. When the new $523 million, 636,000-square-foot hospital, on a leafy campus, opened here in 2012, the model room became real.

So far, ratings of patient satisfaction are in the 99th percentile, up from the 61st percentile before the move. Infection rates and the number of accidents have never been lower.

This proves I am right about everything and all who oppose me should be punished.

Depression hurts (literally)

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An idea I’m often talking about on this blog is the notion that emotions are felt as physical sensations. They are not merely ailments of the soul (which, of course, I don’t believe in) but are ailments of the body. This statement seems benign, but I think it’s really quite revolutionary, turning on end many of our assumptions about emotional states. For one thing, if emotions are physical feelings, perhaps negative emotions can be removed by removing their corresponding physical sensations (which is what pretty much any one does when they calm their nerves by having a drink, or use to sex to, as rapper Peaches once advised, “fuck the pain away.”)

In a thread about depression, a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog connects the emotional to the physical.

On a different note, another thing people don’t understand about severe depression is that it’s a physical experience. Aside from the lack of energy, which seems to be universal, the physical aspect is different for different people. For some people I’ve known, depression physically hurts. For me, it takes the form of a hollowness in the stomach. At my worst, in the bout that eventually led to my diagnosis, I could not eat at all. The very idea of food made me sick. I ended up in the hospital with an IV, having all sorts of tests done, and losing 20% of my body weight. It was months before I could eat any but the blandest of foods.

My mention of that Peaches tune got me thinking about her and I dug up this old video for the song. Never really got into her (I never liked her beats) but she had a certain kind of genius I suppose.

Does the experience of being blackout drunk inform our understanding of consciousness?

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Many years ago—decades really—I was at a party in Waikiki. I got completely smashed on booze (maybe pot too, I don’t recall). The next day I woke up and worriedly ran a mental rundown of the previous night. I realized I couldn’t recall leaving the party and getting home. A friend of mine had driven us to the party and presumably driven me home, but I couldn’t recall walking to her car or the ride back. The was concerning as the car had been parked many blocks from the party which meant I had no memory of walking through the populated street scene that is Waikiki on a Saturday night.

As I think back on this, it occurs to me that this kind of event is very interesting from the point of view of analyzing consciousness and it prompts some interesting questions. Was I conscious during that walk back to the car but not forming any memories? (By this I mean, was there some cohesive entity in my body experiencing the walk but not recording the experiences in memory?) Or was I not conscious at all? (Was there no entity experiencing anything to be recorded in memory?)

I admit it’s a little hard to wrap one’s head around these questions. But it makes me wonder whether what we call memory and what we call consciousness are actually the same thing. Or at least tightly integrated.

It might seem a little odd to even question whether some entity was conscious while I was walking back through Waikiki. After all I was walking, and likely babbling drunkenly at my friend. But a lot of research of the past 100 years does seem to point to the idea of a kind of unconscious or subconscious—a part of the brain that can perform actions and movements without us being aware of it. And frankly, we are unaware of some of our actions all the time in life—does you monitor each step as you walk? Are you explicitly aware when you turn the key in your car ignition while daydreaming about the weekend and chugging some coffee? Human beings can, it seems, run on automatic for at least short periods.

Let’s say you had no way of forming memories, even for a few seconds. (There are, of course, people with very limited short term memory (like the guy in “Memento”) but usually they can remember at least a few minutes.) Could you be conscious? I’m guessing this is what babies in the womb experience. My gut guess here is that they are conscious in a sense (e.g. there is an entity experiencing their perceptions and whatnot) but it’s a very different kind of consciousness that what we experience as defined, ego aware humans.

I dunno… it’s a mystery. But I’m intrigued with the idea that memory and consciousness are united in some way.