Our Microbiome May Be Looking Out for Itself

Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first became aware of our invisible lodgers in the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the past few years that we’ve become really familiar with them.

This recent research has given the microbiome a cuddly kind of fame. We’ve come to appreciate how beneficial our microbes are — breaking down our food, fighting off infections and nurturing our immune system. It’s a lovely, invisible garden we should be tending for our own well-being.

But in the journal Bioessays, a team of scientists has raised a creepier possibility. Perhaps our menagerie of germs is also influencing our behavior in order to advance its own evolutionary success — giving us cravings for certain foods, for example.

Maybe the microbiome is our puppet master.

“One of the ways we started thinking about this was in a crime-novel perspective,” said Carlo C. Maley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the new paper. “What are the means, motives and opportunity for the microbes to manipulate us? They have all three.”

The idea that a simple organism could control a complex animal may sound like science fiction. In fact, there are many well-documented examples of parasites controlling their hosts.

Some species of fungi, for example, infiltrate the brains of ants and coax them to climb plants and clamp onto the underside of leaves. The fungi then sprout out of the ants and send spores showering onto uninfected ants below.

How parasites control their hosts remains mysterious. But it looks as if they release molecules that directly or indirectly can influence their brains.

Our microbiome has the biochemical potential to do the same thing. In our guts, bacteria make some of the same chemicals that our neurons use to communicate with one another, such as dopamine and serotonin. And the microbes can deliver these neurological molecules to the dense web of nerve endings that line the gastrointestinal tract.

by Carl Zimmer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Cashing in on Congestion

[ed. Reminds me of the Mafia controlling garbage collection contracts and protecting its turf. See also: Fight Brews on Changes that Affect Derivatives.]

By 10 a.m. the heat was closing in on the North Shore of Long Island. But 300 miles down the seaboard, at an obscure investment company near Washington, the forecast pointed to something else: profit.

As the temperatures climbed toward the 90s here and air-conditioners turned on, the electric grid struggled to meet the demand. By midafternoon, the wholesale price of electricity had jumped nearly 550 percent.

What no one here knew that day, May 30, 2013, was that the investment company, DC Energy, was reaping rewards from the swelter. Within 48 hours the firm, based in Vienna, Va., had made more than $1.5 million by cashing in on so-called congestion contracts, complex financial instruments that gain value when the grid becomes overburdened, according to an analysis of trading data by The New York Times.

Those profits are a small fraction of the fortune that traders at DC Energy and elsewhere have pocketed because of maneuvers involving the nation’s congested grid. Over the last decade, DC Energy has made about $180 million in New York State alone, The Times found.

Across the nation, investment funds and major banks are wagering billions on similar trades using computer algorithms and teams of Ph.D.s, as they chase profits in an arcane arena that rarely attracts attention.

Congestion occurs when demand for electricity outstrips the immediate supply, sending prices higher as the grid strains to deliver power from distant and often more expensive locations to meet the demand. To help power companies and others offset the higher costs, regional grid operators, which manage the nation’s transmission lines and wholesale power markets, auction off congestion contracts, derivatives linked to thousands of locations on the grid. When electricity prices spike, contract holders collect the difference in prices between points from the grid operators. If the congestion moves in the opposite direction, holders pay the operators.

The contracts were intended to protect the electricity producers, utilities and industries that need to buy power. The thinking was that the contracts would help them hedge against sharp price swings caused by competition as well as the weather, plant failures or equipment problems. Those lower costs could reduce consumers’ bills.

But Wall Street banks and other investors have stepped in, siphoning off much of the money. In New York, DC Energy accounted for more than a quarter of the total $639 million in profits in the congestion markets between 2003 and 2013, The Times found. Some of DC Energy’s biggest paydays involved Port Jefferson, a village 60 miles east of Manhattan. Because of the geography of the grid, moving power from one point to another means demand often briefly outstrips supply here. (...)

DC Energy — and its profits — are an unexpected result of the deregulation of the nation’s electric grid. The idea behind deregulation was to eliminate old monopolies and create robust, competitive markets that would encourage investment and ultimately lower costs for consumers. But in most places, electricity bills have been rising, not falling. While fuel prices, taxes and fees have added directly to the costs, Wall Street-style traders have contributed in subtle ways by turning new markets, like the trading of congestion contracts, to their advantage, The Times analysis found.

by Julie Creswell and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kathy Kmonicek

Gary Clark Jr.

[ed. Channeling Hendrix. Thanks, Deb.]

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children, vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts. But the best is often when nothing is happening. The way a mother picks up the child almost without noticing and carries her across Waller Street while talking with the other woman. What if she could keep all of that? Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

by Jack Gilbert, Art Beat |  Read more:

Image: via:

Criss Canning, Square-Fruited Mallee Gum
via:

via:

No, No, Nine-Ettes

The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?,” asks the title of the National Geographic Channel’s three-part documentary special, premiering this month, the noisy capper to a 90s nostalgia craze that really got raring last year online, along the cable grid, and in the dense foliage of the fashion pages.Grunge; Friends; Seinfeld; Felicity; Dawson’s Creek; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; My So-Called Life; Beverly Hills, 90210; Clueless; Thelma & Louise; The Matrix; Saved by the Bell; Boy Meets World; Beavis and Butt-Head; Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation; Biggie Smalls; Tupac Shakur; the hoop-net arabesques of Michael Jordan—what a hit parade. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a 90s kids’ favorite, are set for a movie reboot, the songs of Alanis Morissette stream from the car speakers of the sporty convertible Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon share in the upcoming The Trip to Italy, and Coogi knitwear has made a comeback. As someone whose decade loyalty is to the 70s, I don’t begrudge others their 90s glow-on. It’s only fair that Generation Xers—the Nine-ettes—enjoy their turn in the hot-tub time machine now that they’re old enough to appreciate what a disappointment life can be after the louche splendors of the old dorm. But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, to borrow the wistful title of Simone Signoret’s memoirs.

Mostly a white people’s pastime, nostalgia used to be a pining for an idealized yesteryear, for a prelapsarian world tinted in sepia. “Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable,” the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven. Ah, no longer. Since the publication of Lasch’s book, in 1991, the Internet and cable TV have colonized the hive mind and set up carnival pavilions. Now every delight is obtainable and on display at an arcade that never closes. Friends, Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files still cycle in syndication; Felicity and My So-Called Life are on Hulu; making a Holy Ghost appearance as a hologram at the Coachella music festival, Tupac and his thug-life gaze have cast the posthumous spell of Malcolm X posters (he is even the subject of a new Broadway musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me); and the grunge look is a perennial, re-applied with a grease gun. This anxious, ravenous speedup of nostalgia—getting wistful over goodies that never went away—is more than a reflection of the overall acceleration of digital culture, a pathetic sign of our determination to dote on every last shiny souvenir of our prolonged adolescence, and an indictment of our gutless refusal to face the rotten future like Stoic philosophers. It’s also a recognition that September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war cast a pall over everything that has come after. The millennium has been a major letdown. Yet let’s not con ourselves. It’s not as if the 90s were some belle époque, either, a last fling before the anvil fell.

Unscrewing this time capsule is opening a can of worms. The 90s were the decade when the last tatters of privacy were torn aside, a national forest of woodies seemed to sprout overnight thanks to the rollout of a little blue pill called Viagra, reality TV unthroned soap opera as the medium’s queen of discord, and political theater lit up like a porno set. The snapshot of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap that torpedoed the married senator’s 1988 presidential hopes looked like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello having a cuddle compared with the sex scandals the 90s were about to run through the grind-house projector. From the pubic hair on the Coke can and the invocation of “Long Dong” Silver in Anita Hill’s testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas to the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress and the pursed-lipped prurience of independent counsel Ken Starr’s Starr Report (which historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most salacious public document in the history of the republic”), the down-and-dirty details were a godsend to late-night comedians and a new breed of leering pundit quite different from the august eggheads of capital sonority, for whom David Broder of The Washington Post was dean. The tone of political discourse and public debate took a distinct dip. The Washington establishment and its tail-wagging courtiers fell into a circular frenzy somewhere between a witch hunt and a panty raid. Unless you were a Clinton-hater and/or a conspiracy hound convinced that Hillary had Vince Foster snuffed out, it wasn’t much fun then and it looks even worse now.

by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: John Ritter

Pink Collar

Modern public relations has, in its own parlance, an image problem. As an investigation copublished by the Columbia Journalism Review and ProPublica put it, the industry was literally birthed from a train wreck. In 1906, ex-reporter Ivy Lee preempted media investigations into an Atlantic City train accident by issuing a statement about the accident to reporters on behalf of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The New York Times printed verbatim what would later be regarded as the first press release. Since then, public relations (often broadly referred to as “communications”) as a practice has expanded to comprise almost sixty thousand workers, and intersects nearly every other industry. Though the addition of technologies such as social media and mass email distribution have added new layers of specialized labor to the sector, the fundamental premise of PR has remained relatively unaltered since its conception: Hired to promote products and people, publicists exist to solicit positive media coverage for their clients.

Now outnumbering journalists four to one, publicists are an omnipresent component of the machinery that powers creative industries like fashion, arts, and publishing, and increasingly also play central roles in social-justice movements. Though organizations such as Free Press and writers like Robert McChesney have led the charge in asserting that the proliferation of these spin doctors constitutes an insidious and growing threat to journalism and democracy, few have bothered to analyze the gendered split between journalists and publicists. In stark contrast to newsrooms, in which women have never exceeded 38 percent, public relations operates as a solidly pink-collar sector of the creative industries and comprises a labor force that is currently over 85 percent female.

The palpable distaste for PR practitioners that continues to swell — spearheaded by the very same members of the media with whom publicists theoretically enjoy a symbiotic relationship — requires, then, a deeper look at how gendered assumptions about work continue to shape our contemporary notions of creative labor under capitalism.

The day-to-day of PR work ranges from producing press releases to manning social media accounts to planning events, but the crux of publicity is the establishment of relationships with the press. Networking with relevant editors and journalists is an essential component of PR, and includes attending industry parties, arranging pitch meetings or getting drinks with influential members of the press, and, in the case of the bigger-budgeted, company-sponsored lunches and dinners, to woo the aforementioned influencers.

In PR, a certain overlap of professional and personal relationships is not only likely, but ideal. As former beauty PR manager Mackenzie Lewis noted in an interview on The Hairpin,

A big part of public relations is building relationships between your brand and the media. Because brands are built by humans and humans run the media, this relationship … often boils down to your run-of-the-mill work friendship. When I was in PR, I had an expense account and a quota of breakfast/lunch/dinner or drink “meetings” I had to go out on each week (seriously). We didn’t have new products launching that often, so I wasn’t always there to pitch a specific story. A lot of times I was there to get to know the editor better so that pitching her in the future would be easier for both of us: I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable calling her and I’d already know how and what she likes being pitched. But, like with other work acquaintances, if you go out for company-sponsored cocktails enough it’s easy to become fast friends. When you inevitably get to the stage where you’re sharing boyfriend drama, it’s not awkward to start a phone call with “I need a favor …”

Though this elision of work and friendship is necessary for effective PR, it also forms the basis of what people find questionable about the profession. In response to Lewis’s description, her interviewer stated, “It’s unfair to the readers not to disclose which products are great and which are there as the result of a friendship. Which is the thing that gets to me, it all seems so phony.” Phoniness is a criticism leveled again and again at PR as a practice that, after all, necessitates an expression of enthusiasm for a product because of pay rather than passion.

The notion of PR as an insidious corporate apparatus designed to pull wool over consumers’ eyes is so widespread that “flack,” once a term that merely denoted a public relations professional, has transformed into an overwhelmingly disparaging synonym for any huckster. Given that the end goal of PR is company or client gain, a healthy suspicion of publicity materials is only reasonable. But so often these misgivings manifest as indictments of the publicist and her work, rather than of the neoliberal economy that enables and necessitates this form of labor. And this is especially troubling given the disproportionate presence of women in PR. With the already high numbers of women in PR continuing to climb, Ragan Communications, a news resource for PR professionals, conducted a video interview with several senior-level publicists to discuss the source of this burgeoning “pink ghetto.” As is the case with most other forms of gendered work, assumptions about women’s “natural” traits guided the discussion.

by Jennifer Pan, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

via:

Rick Baker, Ledger Drawing
via:

The Great American Sell-Off

[ed. Repost. The Great American Sell-Off  hasn't materialized just quite yet. Boomers still seem wedded to their single-family homes (and all their accumulated stuff). But that might change soon. Either that, or they'll just stay put until they can't stay anymore, then leave the cleanup and estate details to the kids. ]

It's 8:55 a.m. on a crisp Thursday morning in the exclusive New Jersey suburb of Bernards Township, and at 34 Emily Rd., more than 60 people are lined up impatiently outside the front door. Inside, owners Mark and Mary Tuller, who were up most of the night and feel like "zombies," are girding themselves for the onslaught: a three-day crush of strangers pouring into their home, pawing through their family's stuff. Attic to basement, nearly everything is tagged with a price, from the mahogany dining room breakfront ($5,000) to the half-used

Mark, a 62-year-old former general counsel for Verizon Wireless, and Mary, a retired math teacher, say they couldn't be more excited about their imminent move to a smaller, Mediterranean-style place on the California coast. But with moving trucks arriving in exactly one week, they're more than a little anxious about whether this estate sale will be successful in unloading nearly three decades' worth of accumulated belongings—especially prized pieces like their antique, hand-knotted Persian rugs (the one in the living room originally cost $20,000). "We wanted to sell these expensive items in a way that brought closure," says Mark, "and didn't want them to just walk out the door for almost nothing."

Indeed, to help facilitate the sale, they've chosen a company called The Grand Bazaar to run it; unlike some other mom-and-pop businesses they interviewed, it actually takes credit cards. But from the moment the doors open and salegoers storm the 5,000-square-foot home like pirates rushing a ship, virtually no one bothers with plastic. Not the man with the white ponytail happily scoring a $1 jug of deer repellent or the woman in chunky diamonds and fur-tipped pumps snapping up old garden hose nozzles. Some bargainers cart off books or clothes in bulk, but most arrive at the checkout table with small items: Christmas decorations, souvenir Parisian drink coasters, a board game from the downstairs toy closet. In fact, when the doors close on the Tuller family sale (final take: on the plus side of $30,000), there's still quite a bit of furniture left, most of which is destined for donation or—cue Mary's nostalgic sighs—the Dumpster. And those expensive rugs? At least $30,000 worth of fancy floor coverings are headed into storage. "The sale was a huge success if you were in the market for unopened soap," says Mark.

Call it the great American sell-off . For years now Americans have been gathering and collecting at an amazing pace, filling homes that over the past half-century have more than doubled in size, to an average of nearly 2,500 square feet. And even that hasn't been enough to contain our nation's overflow of stuff. These days nearly one in 10 U.S. households maintains at least one self-storage unit, 65 percent more than did so in 1995. Filling these spaces, of course, comes naturally to baby boomers. Born into the giddy postwar climate of conspicuous consumption and weaned on decades of easy credit, they're a generation accustomed to regularly leaving offerings at the altar of retail.

That is, until they hit the empty-nest, time-to-start-downsizing phase—and begin wondering what to do with their mountains of accumulated stuff. With some 8,000 Americans turning 65 every day, on average, and the senior population expected to double by 2050, millions are facing a massive, multifaceted purge that's turning out to be much tougher than they thought it would be. And millions more find themselves in similar quandaries as they deal with the truckloads they've inherited from packrat relatives. Indeed, whether they're leaving an heirloom china set at the local consignment store or packing a stately grandfather clock off to Sotheby's, many are discovering that the resale market is glutted with household goods. And oriental rugs are only the beginning. Got a home full of middle-market, traditional-style furniture to sell? Dealers say that stuff's plunged 50 to 75 percent in value. Elaborate silver tea sets are worth more melted than as decorative objects. And huge heavy items like dining-room breakfronts and banker-style desks are often the toughest to unload. "I once sold a piano for $11," says David Rago, a Lambertville, N.J., auctioneer.

by Missy Sullivan, Market Watch |  Read more:
Image: cleverswine

Brain&Beast S/S14 detail
via:

I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here’s What It Did to Me

There’s this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: “I think everybody should like everybody.” You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken from a 1963 interview in Art News, is a great description of how we interact on social media today.

Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
Art News: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things.
Art News: And liking things is like being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

The like and the favorite are the new metrics of success—very literally. Not only are they ego-feeders for the stuff we put online as individuals, but advertisers track their campaigns on Facebook by how often they are liked. A recent New York Timesstory on a krill oil ad campaign lays bare how much the like matters to advertisers. Liking is an economic act.

I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked—even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I’d learn (possibly nothing.)

See, Facebook uses algorithms to decide what shows up in your feed. It isn’t just a parade of sequential updates from your friends and the things you’ve expressed an interest in. In 2014 the News Feed is a highly-curated presentation, delivered to you by a complicated formula based on the actions you take on the site, and across the web. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots making these decisions for me, if I continually said, “good job, robot, I like this.” I also decided I’d only do this on Facebook itself—trying to hit every Like button I came across on the open web would just be too daunting. But even when I kept the experiment to the site itself, the results were dramatic.

by Mat Honan, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Getty

The Salmon Cannon

[ed. Interesting alternative to traditional fish passes. One thing I'd wonder about is the loss of body 'slime', the coating that protects salmon from bacterial infection and premature tissue decomposition. Even careful handling can sometimes impact this natural defense mechanism.]

Salmon are amazing fish. They’ll swim hundreds of miles against the current, hurl themselves up waterfalls, and risk being eaten by bears as they return to their birthplace to spawn. But some obstacles are too much, and that’s where Whooshh Innovations comes in. Behold, the salmon cannon. Seriously, watch this video of fish getting launched out of pneumatic tubes.

Whooshh Innovations ("Whoosh" was already taken) first designed its tubes to transport fruit, but as Washington state debated what do about hydroelectric dams and the salmon whose migrations they blocked, the company saw its technology might have another purpose. If Whooshh tubes could send apples flying over long distances without damaging them, maybe, an employee thought, they could suck fish up and over the dams blocking the Columbia river. (...)

Washington's Columbia river is home to several enormous hydroelectric dams that prevent salmon from migrating to the ocean and back. Some smaller dams have fish ladders — basically slanted mazes that salmon can flop their way up, dodging the dam's turbines. But migration currently stops at the 236-foot-tall Chief Joseph dam, and behind that is Grand Coulee, at 550 feet. Ladders for these dams would be be long and prohibitively difficult for salmon to traverse.

Wildlife departments and public utilities already do strange things to get salmon past manmade barriers, putting them on trucks, loading them onto barges, and in a few cases, lifting them by helicopter. The tubes, Deligan says, could be a less labor-intensive and more effective method, plus it would be less traumatizing to the fish than getting caught and driven around on a truck.

by Josh Dzieza, The Verge | Read more:
Video: Whooshh via YouTube

Chilled Avocado Soup

Chilled Avocado Soup

serves 4

olive oil
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
1/2 inch fresh ginger, minced
a pinch of dried chilli
2 lime, juice
10 mint leaves
3 medium size avocados
1 cup water
salt & pepper

Mint olive oil:
Stomp 15-20 mint leaves in a mortar, add 3 tbsp olive oil. Let it sit for a while before dripping it over the soup.

Add olive oil to a pan on medium heat. Sauté onion, garlic, ginger and chilli until soft.

Place in a blender together with the rest of the ingredients. Pulse it and taste, add more salt and water if needed.

Top with a couple of drips of the Mint olive oil. Enjoy!

via:

fish eggs
via:

You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?

We have a few go-to archetypes when it comes to pedophilia: There is the playground lurker, the chat-room predator, and the monstrous (often religious) authority figure. These men are usually middle-aged, unrepentant serial abusers who are caught only after remaining undetected for years. But what about the preceding decades? When do these urges first begin to manifest?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you’re attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?

I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I’d hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.

“My name is Adam,” it read. “I’m 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you.”

by Luke Malone, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Simon Prades

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

On Betrayal

Oprah once told a story on her show about a person who had hurt her deeply, someone she’d been holding a grudge against for a long time. One day she saw them on the street laughing, and she said to herself, “You mean that person is laughing while I’m sitting here still feeling miserable?!” And in that moment she realized waiting for someone who doesn’t care about you enough to take responsibility for hurting you is the most useless battle you could ever try to win.

Being betrayed by someone is the worst, most excruciatingly devastating thing a human being can go through. It is a sin against relationships and an affront to trust. And we’re not talking about someone dating someone you used to date, or eating the last piece of pizza before you had a chance to claim it. We’re talking about conspiring, cheating, compulsive lying, layoffs, divorce, the real big things that destroy people.

I have experience in being seriously betrayed by someone I loved very much, someone with whom I had a long-term relationship, someone I believe had my best interest in mind. That’s always what we just expect in any kind of relationship we maintain, isn’t it? That the other person holds up their end of the bargain: We’re in this together, and I’m not going to screw you.

My friends turn to me when they face their own types of betrayal because I. Got. Screwed. There is no other way to say it: This person who I loved screwed me big time. His actions towards me spun my world out of orbit and had very lasting effects that I struggle with to this day. (...)

So when people come to me and want advice for dealing with that kind of hurt someone intentionally caused them, all those feelings are fresh again, stirred up like a very ugly dust storm in my still-mending heart. I don’t just know what they’re going through, I feel it, and it really, really sucks. I still wonder if I’ll ever get an apology. If he’ll ever get that what he did to me was inhumane and borderline sociopathic. Does he remember? Does he care?

I’m going to be honest with you: Some people do not care. Some people hurt others in callus ways and don’t look back. Some people are emotionally vacant or detached, and that’s how they behave. For a long time after the person I knew betrayed me, I would watch how he interacted with others at work or on social media, and I would just have this pain realizing that he didn’t even give me a second thought. He laughed at jokes and talked about movies he saw on the weekend. He built a house and went on vacation. His life continued uninterrupted while I had to heal from a serious, life-altering pain. I was forever changed; he was unmoved.

Some people, unfortunately, can get away with treating people terribly. They just can. We’re not supposed to think like that, we’re supposed to think that karma exists and every action you take towards another person will come back to you. But some people really will just hurt others and move on, which is sometimes even more hurtful than the betrayal in the first place.

They can do this because they have their own hurts, deep hurts that have woven scars all over their hearts and minds. Maybe someone treated them terribly in the past, at a formable age, and they’ve learned since then that it’s ok if you do likewise to others. Maybe they are so shut down from emotional commitments to others that hurting people with their actions doesn’t register anymore. Maybe they’re very aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they do it anyway because they feel their needs are more important. Whatever the reason, something in their past numbed them from the result of their actions, or is telling them, “It’s ok to do this, even if it hurts someone.” Ask forgiveness, not permission? Maybe they think that adage applies to people’s hearts, too.

by Sarah Hatter, A Small Voyage |  Read more:

Image: Alyssa L. Miller via:

The God Effect

When I was 12, on family vacation in New Mexico, I watched a group of elaborately-costumed Navajo men belt out one intimidating song after the next. They executed a set of beautifully coordinated dance turns to honour the four cardinal directions, each one symbolising sacred gifts from the gods. Yet the tourist-packed audience lost interest and my family, too, prepared to leave. Then, all of a sudden, the dancers were surprised by a haunting, muscled old man adorned with strange pendants, animal skulls, and scars etching patterns into his body and face.

Because the dancers were obviously terrified of this man I, too, became afraid and wanted to run, but we all stood rooted to the spot as he walked silently and majestically into the desert night. Afterwards, the lead dancer apologised profusely for the tribe’s shaman, or medicine man: he was holy but a bit eccentric. My 12-year-old self wondered how one might become like this extraordinary individual, so singular, respected and brave he could take the desert night alone.

That question has fuelled much of my neuroscience through the years. As I studied the brain, I found that the right arrangement of neural circuitry and chemistry could generate astonishingly creative and holy persons on the one hand, or profoundly delusional, even violent, fanatics on the other. To intensify the ‘god effect’ in people already attracted to religious ideas, my studies revealed, all we had to do was boost the activity of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, crucial for balanced emotion and thought, on the right side of the brain. But should dopamine spike too high, murderous impulses like terrorism and jihad could rear up instead. (...)

The medical literature abounds with descriptions of creative bursts following infusion of dopamine-enhancing drugs such as l-dopa (levodopa), used to treat Parkinson's Disease (PD). Bipolar illness, which sends sufferers into prolonged bouts of dopamine-fuelled mania followed by devastating spells of depressive illness, can sometimes produce work of amazing virtuosity during the manic phase. Often these individuals refuse to take anti-dopamine drugs that can prevent the manic episodes precisely because they value the creative activity of which they are capable during these altered states.

Hallucinogenic drugs such as Psilocybin and LSD, which indirectly stimulate dopamine activity in the brain’s frontal lobes, can produce religious experience even in the avowedly non-religious. These hallucinogens produce vivid imagery, sometimes along with near psychotic breaks or intense spiritual experience, all tied to stimulation of dopamine receptors on neurons in the limbic system, the seat of emotion located in the midbrain, and in the prefrontal cortex, the upper brain that is the centre of complex thought.

Given all these fascinating correlations, sometime after the attack on the twin towers in New York City, I began to hypothesise that dopamine might provide a simple explanation for the paradoxical god effect. When dopamine in the limbic and prefrontal regions of the brain was high, but not too high, it would produce the ability to entertain unusual ideas and associations, leading to heightened creativity, inspired leadership and profound religious experience. When dopamine was too high, however, it would produce mental illness in genetically vulnerable individuals. In those who had been religious before, fanaticism could be the result. (...)

The primary pathology associated with PD is a loss of dopamine activity, hypothesised for years to drive ‘hedonic reward’ or pleasure – that sense of well-being we all feel when we indulge in an experience like good food or sex. Whenever dopamine release occurred, proponents held, we would get a small hit of pleasure. That story made sense because many drugs of abuse, such as cocaine or amphetamine, stimulate dopamine activity in the midbrain.

But recent research had revealed something more complex. A Cambridge University neuroscientist named Wolfram Schultz had shown that dopamine was not a simple pleasure molecule, delivering a simple reward. Instead, it alerted us only to unexpected rewards, spiking when the prize delivered far exceeded the expected result.

by Patrick McNamara, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: Lucy Nicholson, Reuters