The Eyes Have It

   Funny thing, our vision.  Remember reading about those cortical nerves and a third being dedicated just to our eyes?  Turns out that our brains devote a lot more space to our eyes as well, or maybe it's the other way around (estimates are that between 30-50% of our neocortex is devoted to our vision).  For one thing, our vision arrives upside down on our retinas, complete with a blind spot for each eye (an actual missing piece).  And the eye is constantly vibrating, anywhere from 120 to 200 times per second; and you might ask, just how do they know this?  When a drug is administered that stops this movement, the patient loses vision (which returns when the drug wears off and the eyes are allowed to resume their motion; in other words, without the vibrating we would not be able to see).  The brain is left to sort all of this out, from "filling in" the blind spot to making sense of the moving images (think Steadycam).  Sounds easy enough but the images pretty much arrive as just data to the brain.  Think of a single line, then add another and you might have a math symbol or a letter.  Another line and you likely have something else, a triangle or another letter.  But begin adding a lot more lines and you have circles and squares and musical notes mixed in with other lines.  And then there's color.  It's quite the job for the brain to make sense of it all, to piece the data together and make a final evaluation of what the total image is or might be and how it all fits in together...and that's just the input;  Now the brain has to process and create a response or decide to file the packet to memory.  Well, let's give it all a test shall we?  Take a quick peek at the images of the Mona Lisa.  Go ahead, take your time...overall you'll likely find them quite similar with perhaps a few small differences...but it's your brain being fooled.*  Despite all the abilities of our image processing, sometimes our brains just cannot sort the differences...

   So all of that comes from that brain lecture series I mentioned last post; but it also provided me a segue to add a few quick updates to earlier posts.  Take the recent one on bees -- they are right & left handed much as we are, or seem to have a preference as to which side they individually favor.  And as you know, are disappearing quite rapidly; 30-50% loss of honeybee colonies each year on average (it was 44% in 2016).  Our pesticide use has jumped 2.5 times higher than the days of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring book and her warning on the effects of the widely used (at the time) DDT.  In  piece in Discover last year, a spokesman at CropLife America (listed as a trade partnership of seed and pesticide manufacturers) said that studies measuring the effects of such pesticides on bees done in field conditions "consistently demonstrate no negative effects;"  still, most large retailers (minus Amazon) have dropped carrying neonicotinoids which are suspected as a major player in their demise.  Years earlier, World Ark told the story of the effort to revive the Mayan tradition of raising wild bees:  “The bees are very sensitive,” keeper Maria Torres Tzab explained.  “Be happy when you see them.  Have a good aura,” Torres’ husband, Nicolas Castillo Ucam, said.  “They will leave if people fight—they are sad because they understand.”...About 200 years ago, European bees, which produce much more honey than the stingless variety, were introduced to Mexico.  By the 1970s, it seemed that this competition, combined with pesticides and other chemicals, deforestation and an increasingly fragile ecosystem, had all but eliminated stingless bees in the region.  Or, maybe someone did insult the bees, and they actually flew away.  Regardless, about 90 percent of managed colonies disappeared on the peninsula between 1980 and 2005, according to bee science journal Apidologie...“Meliponiculture isn’t new in our culture,” Ceballos (Atilano Ceballos Loeza, director of the U Yits Ka’an school of ecological agriculture) said.  “It’s pre-Hispanic, from thousands of years ago.  You can see it in the ceramics and ceremonies of the Mayans.”  In the Madrid Codex --a 112- page Mayan book that documents the culture’s calendars, rituals and daily life-- the last 12 pages are purely glyphs about Melipona beekeeping.  Wait, how long have bees been around?  Estimates are 30 million years.  And honey, being acidic, can last for millennia if not exposed to humidity (ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead in honey for this reason).  And mead (sometimes called honey wine) was given to newlyweds in the days of yore (a month's supply) in the hopes that they would soon have children, thus our word "honeymoon."

    Jump to another recent post on coffee and caffeine (the Robusta bean has 50-60% more caffeine than the more popular Arabica).   There were a few things I didn't add in that post, such as the average yield per coffee tree is about ten pounds of berries (inside the berries are the seeds, which becomes your coffee "beans"); and after Brazil, the next largest producer of coffee is...Vietnam.  But what most people are really interested in are the charts of caffeine; how much in a cup of coffee vs. a cup of tea or a can of Coke?  Turns out that one has to get down to specifics.  What brand of coffee or tea, and how many ounces?  A nice guide to compare the various vendors and types of drinks appeared in the The Sunday, recently absorbed away from being a free weekly to being part of the local Las Vegas newspaper.  Here are a few examples from their piece, adjusted for 16 ounce comparisons: Starbucks Caffe Americano = 225; Starbucks caffe mocha = 175; average brewed Folgers = 80; Honest Tea organic lemon = 85; KeVita Master Brew Kombucha = 86; Diet Coke = 60; regular Coke = 45; Red Bull (one can at 8 oz.) = 80; 5-hour Energy (one tiny bottle at just 2 oz.) = 200, the same as two capsules of NoDoz or Vivarin; Zantex-3 weight loss (2 capsules) = 300; Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream bar (4 oz.) = 29.  Are you awake yet?

    There was more of course, even something as simple as peeling away the husks from the new crop of sweet corn just making its way onto the produce shelves.  Those pesky strings you have to get off before getting to the kernels underneath...look more closely and you'll find that each one attaches to an individual kernel (it's their pollinator strand, the kernel being a hoped-for seed that will germinate).  Just as we pick off the dead flowers from our hanging baskets of petunias or budding heads of basil, the plants are doing nothing more that attempting to make seeds to continue onto the next generation; we pluck them and the plant starts over, making a new flower or bud in another attempt.  Perhaps we'll miss one and a dried flower will successfully fall to the ground and begin its growth.  Just slowing down and watching the delicate dance of nature is amazing.  Caffeine or not, eyes or not, we can all be awake to what is around us...if we want.  As Sergio Mendes wrote in his song Look Around (it would become the final album of the original group): All the secrets of the skies in a drop of rain; look around, just look around.  Gold dust, silver and surprise if you look around, just look around.  All the wisdom of the sea in a grain of sand; look around, just look around.  Set the child within you free when you look around, just look around...That cloud's a bird flying through the air; that happy leaf's going to the fair...It's all there, it's all there.  All the innocence of spring in a blade of grass, he wrote.  I loved the song then, and love the thought today.  "Stop," he wrote, "and look around."

*Can't find much difference in the pictures.  Then try this simple experiment if you have a screen that will allow it (such as a laptop); flip the pictures right-side up.  The illusion comes because your brain is filling in the gaps and is not really designed to process images upside down...so it doesn't really do so and instead fills in what it think you "should" be seeing...now how do those hallucinations work?  It gets even more interesting...look around some more and we're discovering just how much and how little we know about how things --including we humans-- work.