Homeostasis
The word comes from the Greek and basically means "similar stillness." It also came from a piece by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee who bravely and successfully wrote a massive tome of the history of cancer, a book which went on to win him the Pulitzer Prize (The Emperor of All Maladies). But in this case, his piece was about how fortunate most of us are to have our bodies just stay the same, for that wound to heal or for the back to grow less sore...indeed to just wake up each morning. His story emerged after a fall from his father and of now seeing him hospitalized "...slipping down some evolutionary chain, through a series of phylogenetic trapdoors...toward a primitive, reptiian consciousness." His reflection on his father's age, dementia, bodily collapse is something that, if we're lucky, will await us all, that ebbing of life and its conscious beginning of the process of throwing in the towel, of finally acknowledging that the stuggle is growing too difficult and that it should now come to an end. At that point life becomes the cold that doesn't end, the food that doesn't appetize, the dream that continues indefinitely.
Perhaps some of this line of thought stuck with me because of some lectures which I'm listening to by Professor Craig H. Heller who discusses the "science" of sleep. It's been fascinating so far, discovering that elephants and giraffes and horses all require just 4 hours of sleep each night, and that some birds and dolphins can fly and swim while 50% of their brain sleeps and the other 50% stays alert. But as the lectures have moved into circadian rhythms and hibernation, dreams and consciousness, the end result appears to be that despite all of the brain wave studies and detailed monitoring, there is little that we really understand about what sleep is and why we need it at all (the context of the brain "repairing" itself seems to be one of the most misunderstood --and questioned-- theories). Most interesting might be that while the scientific study of sleep has puzzled us since doctors and scientists began looking at it in the 1800s, the actual brainwave studies of sleep (the use of EEGs and such) only began about a hundred years ago (some of this I touched on in a few earlier posts...Zzzzs & Sleep, Hippo, Sleep).
For me, the thought of falling asleep and dreaming is something I always look forward to, my nightly drowsiness filled with anticipation as if I were a child being granted a free ticket to a movie. What crazy, colorful and wild adventure will I view before waking up I would wonder as I closed my eyes (a recent dream had me watching an airport cargo-moving vehicle, of the sort that moves massive shipping containers, only this vehicle was a shiny royal blue stretch Cadillac, a sight that baffled and impressed me even in the dream; often I awaken and have to wonder "where did that come from?"). But then a few nights ago came the sleepless nights. I rarely have those (and feel fortunate for many are not so lucky and suffer sleepless nights quite often); first came a fitful night, one of restlessness and feeling unsettled, then followed a night of almost no rest. The early morning hours arrived and finally sleep came, but two hours later I was awake. Exhausted, thrown off, groggy, extra sleep would continue to allude me that entire day.* The lecture series says that when that happens that we never "bank" that deficit, that it stays with us until our bodies somehow catch up. And should we fail to do so, systems will begin to falter.
A book by Michael Singer talks about all of us having a "roommate" in our heads, a voice that never stops talking. His own story to fame is that of learning to let go, that fate will find and take you to where you should be...but you begin the journey by learning to distance yourself from listening to your "roommate." It's similar to the practice of meditation, of silence, of being quiet, a practice much harder than it sounds. That background voice, that scheduler, is always there, always yakking, telling and reminding you that there is much to do, appointments to keep, dogs to feed and pills to take, jobs to go to and bills to pay. No wonder we crave vacations where we can forget all that, even for a few days. But he says, we can and should "vacation" far more than we do, to take breaks from that voice and just stop and take in all that is around you, sieze the moment...dream. In the lecture series, Dr. Heller says that this "voice" is referred to by scientists as our brain being in a de-synchronized state and that as we begin to fall into non-REM sleep (a stage of sleep but not the next level of deep Rapid Eye Movement sleep when our physical body basically enters a state of paralysis, thus giving us that "can't run away" feeling when dreaming, our brain still sending the signals but getting no muscular response), our brainwaves slowly shift away from the busy waking state and become synchronized. He draws the metaphor this way: walking into a symphony hall for a concert you are hearing all sorts of sounds, from people talking around you to instruments being tuned up (this is our waking state, our "voice" when your brain is processing a variety of unrelated data and trying to make sense of it); but once the conductor taps his baton and the orchestra begins playing you hear only the melody of the concert, this being the synchronized non-REM sleep which appears on monitors as slow undulating brainwaves.
But this isn't about sleep. Restless nights for many of us are just another aspect of the break of the norm, of homeostasis gone awry. All of which brings us to the horse. Again, I know little about horses, even if my wife loves them, but it was a review in The New York Review of Books which got me interested in Ulrich Raulff's Farewell to the Horse. Less an anatomical, raising or breeding book, his rather extensive history talks about the change in our status of the horse throughout history. Think of it this way...the number eight million. This would be a number just shy of the populations of cities such as New York or London. But go back to the first world war and this was the number of horses killed in that war. A staggering number, to be sure, but even more amazing to consider the number of horses actually used (a good view of this, if you haven't already seen it, is the Steven Spielberg film War Horse). Go back to early days of Persian battles and invading Mongol tribes, even the streets of London & NewYork (as early as 1880, horses were pulling horse "cars" and moving 160 million people in Manhattan alone, a change from from their pastoral farm beginnings and a move quite hard on their bodies, a move that reduced their life expectancy by 75%); horses were revered for farming (it often took 40 horses to pull a manual combine), for games and for attacking speed. Or so it seemed as we learned history in schools. Coupled with this possibly distorted view was discovering that our American history of "cowboys & Indians" was apparently anything but, the arrow- and gun-shooting riders limited to a rather small group (primarily in Texas) with most native Americans quite uninterested in this unfamiliar animal brought up from South America (by Spanish conquistadors who alone lost hundreds of horses during each journey across the Atlantic, all in an effort to bring this "Arabian" steed --from whence the majority of horses originated-- to this newly "discovered" land). Says the author: In the white imagination, the Native Americans are horse riders. Often depicted as "noble savages," it's hard to picture them without their horses. Like the aristocrats of Europe, the prarie noblemen are at home on horseback. Like their legendary counterparts, the cowboys, the popular perception of the Native Americans is of them fused with their horses in a thoroughly equestrian existence...The ubiquity of this image in the white imagination makes it all the more astonishing when we learn that the horse-riding Native Americans were in fact latecomers in the history of the native Indian tribes, even in the horse-rearing era, and that the use and breeding of horses was far from typical of all the tribes of North America. On the contrary, the Eastern Woodland Indians, and also the tribes of the Midwest and the South, did not have horses and neither did they adopt them later on as other tribes did...Even the famous Apache, the glorious Winnetou tribe, only rode up to the point of engaging the enemy; they dismounted to fight the battle itself.
Passenger pigeons, once crowding the sky in waves that darkened entire areas, now gone. Melting glaciers, dinosaurs, grandparents and fathers, much like the one aptly captured in Dr. Mukherjee's writing. We almost seem to live in a world where homeostasis is not the norm but the exception. Changes are always occurring, even as our lights stay on and our water flows. And we are the lucky ones. For those in poverty, or trapped in war-torn cities, or genetically dealing with an unusual condition, or living with polluted water, or afraid to step outside the front door...for them, homeostasis is a terrible thing; change --any change-- would likely be welcome. The horse was once considered magnificent, and was a common sight for many. But now they can seem as rare as spotting a deer making us ooh and ahh if we drive by and see one out the window, a site far from the eight million that were marched off to war never to return. One has to wonder what other sights we take for granted, sights that perhaps will no longer be so common in the world of the future. Meat? Trees? Snow-capped mountains? Us? The world is changing and the illusion just might be in our thinking that for us all is remaining the same...
*One interesting addendum to this is the reverse ailment of narcolepsy (unable to stay awake), that of being truly unable to sleep. Certain people move beyond insomnia to a point where despite being exhausted, nothing will put them to sleep. Even chemicals or darkened rooms will not work and eventually --months later-- they'll actually die from lack of sleep. Upon being autopsied, the area of their brains that control the on/off sleep regulation are usually found to be damaged or somehow impaired. Sleeping sickness (an epidemic that hits about once each century as first recorded in the 1600s), has no known cause. Narcolepsy has no known cure...
Perhaps some of this line of thought stuck with me because of some lectures which I'm listening to by Professor Craig H. Heller who discusses the "science" of sleep. It's been fascinating so far, discovering that elephants and giraffes and horses all require just 4 hours of sleep each night, and that some birds and dolphins can fly and swim while 50% of their brain sleeps and the other 50% stays alert. But as the lectures have moved into circadian rhythms and hibernation, dreams and consciousness, the end result appears to be that despite all of the brain wave studies and detailed monitoring, there is little that we really understand about what sleep is and why we need it at all (the context of the brain "repairing" itself seems to be one of the most misunderstood --and questioned-- theories). Most interesting might be that while the scientific study of sleep has puzzled us since doctors and scientists began looking at it in the 1800s, the actual brainwave studies of sleep (the use of EEGs and such) only began about a hundred years ago (some of this I touched on in a few earlier posts...Zzzzs & Sleep, Hippo, Sleep).
For me, the thought of falling asleep and dreaming is something I always look forward to, my nightly drowsiness filled with anticipation as if I were a child being granted a free ticket to a movie. What crazy, colorful and wild adventure will I view before waking up I would wonder as I closed my eyes (a recent dream had me watching an airport cargo-moving vehicle, of the sort that moves massive shipping containers, only this vehicle was a shiny royal blue stretch Cadillac, a sight that baffled and impressed me even in the dream; often I awaken and have to wonder "where did that come from?"). But then a few nights ago came the sleepless nights. I rarely have those (and feel fortunate for many are not so lucky and suffer sleepless nights quite often); first came a fitful night, one of restlessness and feeling unsettled, then followed a night of almost no rest. The early morning hours arrived and finally sleep came, but two hours later I was awake. Exhausted, thrown off, groggy, extra sleep would continue to allude me that entire day.* The lecture series says that when that happens that we never "bank" that deficit, that it stays with us until our bodies somehow catch up. And should we fail to do so, systems will begin to falter.
A book by Michael Singer talks about all of us having a "roommate" in our heads, a voice that never stops talking. His own story to fame is that of learning to let go, that fate will find and take you to where you should be...but you begin the journey by learning to distance yourself from listening to your "roommate." It's similar to the practice of meditation, of silence, of being quiet, a practice much harder than it sounds. That background voice, that scheduler, is always there, always yakking, telling and reminding you that there is much to do, appointments to keep, dogs to feed and pills to take, jobs to go to and bills to pay. No wonder we crave vacations where we can forget all that, even for a few days. But he says, we can and should "vacation" far more than we do, to take breaks from that voice and just stop and take in all that is around you, sieze the moment...dream. In the lecture series, Dr. Heller says that this "voice" is referred to by scientists as our brain being in a de-synchronized state and that as we begin to fall into non-REM sleep (a stage of sleep but not the next level of deep Rapid Eye Movement sleep when our physical body basically enters a state of paralysis, thus giving us that "can't run away" feeling when dreaming, our brain still sending the signals but getting no muscular response), our brainwaves slowly shift away from the busy waking state and become synchronized. He draws the metaphor this way: walking into a symphony hall for a concert you are hearing all sorts of sounds, from people talking around you to instruments being tuned up (this is our waking state, our "voice" when your brain is processing a variety of unrelated data and trying to make sense of it); but once the conductor taps his baton and the orchestra begins playing you hear only the melody of the concert, this being the synchronized non-REM sleep which appears on monitors as slow undulating brainwaves.
But this isn't about sleep. Restless nights for many of us are just another aspect of the break of the norm, of homeostasis gone awry. All of which brings us to the horse. Again, I know little about horses, even if my wife loves them, but it was a review in The New York Review of Books which got me interested in Ulrich Raulff's Farewell to the Horse. Less an anatomical, raising or breeding book, his rather extensive history talks about the change in our status of the horse throughout history. Think of it this way...the number eight million. This would be a number just shy of the populations of cities such as New York or London. But go back to the first world war and this was the number of horses killed in that war. A staggering number, to be sure, but even more amazing to consider the number of horses actually used (a good view of this, if you haven't already seen it, is the Steven Spielberg film War Horse). Go back to early days of Persian battles and invading Mongol tribes, even the streets of London & NewYork (as early as 1880, horses were pulling horse "cars" and moving 160 million people in Manhattan alone, a change from from their pastoral farm beginnings and a move quite hard on their bodies, a move that reduced their life expectancy by 75%); horses were revered for farming (it often took 40 horses to pull a manual combine), for games and for attacking speed. Or so it seemed as we learned history in schools. Coupled with this possibly distorted view was discovering that our American history of "cowboys & Indians" was apparently anything but, the arrow- and gun-shooting riders limited to a rather small group (primarily in Texas) with most native Americans quite uninterested in this unfamiliar animal brought up from South America (by Spanish conquistadors who alone lost hundreds of horses during each journey across the Atlantic, all in an effort to bring this "Arabian" steed --from whence the majority of horses originated-- to this newly "discovered" land). Says the author: In the white imagination, the Native Americans are horse riders. Often depicted as "noble savages," it's hard to picture them without their horses. Like the aristocrats of Europe, the prarie noblemen are at home on horseback. Like their legendary counterparts, the cowboys, the popular perception of the Native Americans is of them fused with their horses in a thoroughly equestrian existence...The ubiquity of this image in the white imagination makes it all the more astonishing when we learn that the horse-riding Native Americans were in fact latecomers in the history of the native Indian tribes, even in the horse-rearing era, and that the use and breeding of horses was far from typical of all the tribes of North America. On the contrary, the Eastern Woodland Indians, and also the tribes of the Midwest and the South, did not have horses and neither did they adopt them later on as other tribes did...Even the famous Apache, the glorious Winnetou tribe, only rode up to the point of engaging the enemy; they dismounted to fight the battle itself.
Passenger pigeons, once crowding the sky in waves that darkened entire areas, now gone. Melting glaciers, dinosaurs, grandparents and fathers, much like the one aptly captured in Dr. Mukherjee's writing. We almost seem to live in a world where homeostasis is not the norm but the exception. Changes are always occurring, even as our lights stay on and our water flows. And we are the lucky ones. For those in poverty, or trapped in war-torn cities, or genetically dealing with an unusual condition, or living with polluted water, or afraid to step outside the front door...for them, homeostasis is a terrible thing; change --any change-- would likely be welcome. The horse was once considered magnificent, and was a common sight for many. But now they can seem as rare as spotting a deer making us ooh and ahh if we drive by and see one out the window, a site far from the eight million that were marched off to war never to return. One has to wonder what other sights we take for granted, sights that perhaps will no longer be so common in the world of the future. Meat? Trees? Snow-capped mountains? Us? The world is changing and the illusion just might be in our thinking that for us all is remaining the same...
*One interesting addendum to this is the reverse ailment of narcolepsy (unable to stay awake), that of being truly unable to sleep. Certain people move beyond insomnia to a point where despite being exhausted, nothing will put them to sleep. Even chemicals or darkened rooms will not work and eventually --months later-- they'll actually die from lack of sleep. Upon being autopsied, the area of their brains that control the on/off sleep regulation are usually found to be damaged or somehow impaired. Sleeping sickness (an epidemic that hits about once each century as first recorded in the 1600s), has no known cause. Narcolepsy has no known cure...
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