(re)Turn Here

    Returning to the recent post on insects and other things that may be "bugging" you,  I neglected to mention the feature story in National Geographic titled "Where Have All the Insects Gone?"  The article said in part: If humans were to suddenly disappear, biologist Edward O. Wilson has famously observed, the Earth would “regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago.”  But “if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”  It is, therefore, shocking --and alarming-- that in most places scientists have looked recently, they’ve found that insect numbers are falling...Researchers working in a protected forest in New Hampshire found that the number of beetles there had fallen by more than 80 percent since the mid-1970s, while the bugs’ diversity --the number of different kinds-- had dropped by nearly 40 percent...A recent study of North American birds found that their numbers also have been in steep decline—down by almost a third since 1970.  Species with insect-heavy diets have been among the most hard-hit.  Wrote Audubon, one culprit may be the pesticide carbofuran, a chemical so strong that: ...a quarter teaspoon can kill a 400-pound bear in minutes.  It’s especially lethal for birds.  Whereas the pesticide DDT, banned in the 1970s after driving Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, and Brown Pelicans to near extinction, works its way up the food chain gradually, like a progressive disease, carbofuran’s effect is instantaneous.  “It interferes with the enzymes that help nerves talk to each other,” says Ngaio Richards, a Montana-based wildlife biologist with an expertise in forensic science, who wrote a book documenting global animal poisonings from carbofuran.  “When an animal is exposed, it goes into convulsions and respiratory failure.  It’s an excruciating death."...Special agent Ken Dulik has witnessed so many carbofuran poisonings in his 30-plus years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that he can spot an eagle killed by the chemical.  “When they go into convulsions, their tail and wings spread out and their head arches over the neck backwards,” he says.  “It’s a fast and brutal death.  Once you’ve seen it, you know what it is.”  Despite carbofuran being banned in 63 countries, U.S. laws do not prohibit chemical makers from exporting banned pesticides to other countries, something one U.S. company did until 2019.

     Yuck, what a way to start the new year.  Can we return to an earlier time?  Unfortunately, when it comes to the days and weeks after the holidays, the meaning behind that word "return" seems to take on another meaning.  Said Reuters: Optoro, which helps retailers sort, resell and dispose of returned merchandise...predicts that 2020 U.S. holiday returns will hit $115 billion between Thanksgiving and end of January...The in-store apparel return rate is 5-8%, while online runs around 30%, said Rob Zomok, president of global operations at Inmar Intelligence, which processes roughly 600 million retail and e-commerce returns annually.  From the consumer viewpoint, returns are easy for the most part, usually as simple as taking it back or dropping it off at a pickup site.  But for the retailer, questions such as can you re-sell the item, or has it been opened or tried on, come as often as deciding whether it's worth the cost to ship or restock it.  For many it is simply easier (and perhaps cheaper) to just toss the item, as in 5 billions pounds worth, said Optoro.  So why doesn't this stuff go to charity* or to people and countries that could use them?   Many large retailers such as Target do indeed donate many of their returns as in millions upon millions of dollars worth (in the case of Target, that total was $225 million in 2019).  But let's say your a smaller store and you feel that you want to do your part but your backroom is getting a bit full (and new products are arriving).  So you rent a small semi to fill and then what?  Your workers now are loading the goods, possibly driving the truck, but to where?  Multiply that scenario by the thousands upon thousands of shipping containers stuck on ships or docks and being abandoned or auctioned off (companies still have to pay "rent" on those containers even to have them just sit there), and the result is almost a new version of Storage Wars.

     But now that the holidays and gifts and yes, returns are winding down, some physicists are again pondering the definition of what exactly is a new year.  As mentioned in Smithsonian: The idea that time is an illusion is an old one, predating any Times Square ball drop or champagne celebrations.  It reaches back to the days of Heraclitus and Parmenides, pre-Socratic thinkers who are staples of introductory philosophy courses.  Heraclitus argued that the primary feature of the universe is that it is always changing.  Parmenides, foreshadowing Einstein, countered by suggesting that there was no such thing as change.  Put into modern language, Parmenides believed the universe is the set of all moments at once.  The entire history of the universe simply is...This “timeless” view of the universe goes against our usual thinking.  We perceive our lives as unfolding.  But it has adherents even in contemporary physics.  The laws of nature, as we currently understand them, treat all moments as equally real.  No one is picked out as special; the laws simply say how any moment relates to the previous one and to the next.

    I was reminded of that during the movie The Intern, when the job interviewer asked a 70-year old Robert De Niro where he saw himself in 10 years.  "When I'm 80?," asked a puzzled De Niro.  Neuroscientist David J, Linden wrote in The Atlantic: The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience.  Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything.  All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance.  There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation.  Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV.  That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours.  A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation...Although I can prepare for death in all sorts of practical ways**--getting my financial affairs in order, updating my will, writing reference letters to support the trainees in my lab after I’m gone-- I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way.  My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging...the brain spends much of its time and energy actively making predictions about the future—mostly the next few moments.  Will that baseball flying through the air hit my head?  Am I likely to become hungry soon?  Is that approaching stranger a friend or a foe?  These predictions are deeply rooted, automatic, and subconscious.  They can’t be turned off through mere force of will.  And because our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future.  In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.

 

    You do reflect on your past, wrote Cory Taylor in her book, Dying.  You look for patterns and turning points and wonder if any of it is significant.  You have the urge to relate the story of your life for your children so that you can set the record straight, and so that they can form some sort of idea where they came from...Death is a taboo subject, absurdly so.  When asked to appear on a television show offering "open and honest communication," she found the questions being asked rather "unsurprising": Did I have a bucket list, had I considered suicide, had I become religious, was I scared, was there anything good about dying, did I have any regrets, did I believe in an afterlife, had I changed my priorities in life, was I unhappy or depressed, was I likely to take more risks given that I was dying anyway, what would I miss the most, how would I like to be remembered?  These were the same questions I'd been asking myself ever since I was diagnosed with cancer.  Andrew Durbin, in reviewing a book about the demise of gay bars, wrote in the London Review of Books: At some point​ on a night out an older queen will swing down from the rafters to let you know you’re too late. Five, maybe ten years ago, he explains, it was much better here. The music was better, the clientele was better, the neighbourhood was less gentrified, more authentic. What is he still doing here then? It doesn’t matter. Encounter him often enough and you begin to understand that lost time can’t be regained, only embellished (I should note that one surprising part of the book: ...discusses the gay skinheads and white nationalists who used to frequent the local pubs...wait, what??).  

      One book I finished (two books, really) was Paul McCartney's The Lyrics, a tome by the prolific songwriter who wrote: Normally, for me, a song takes a few hours.  Sometimes they fall out more quickly, but normally it's about three or four hours of sitting there and thinking about it, and the first verse comes in and then the second verse.  In the early days, when John and I first started writing songs, that's about how long it would take.  In a sense, you have to give the 79-year old credit for being so lucid in taking us readers back to when and how the songs came about (who knew that Got to Get You Into My Life was about the Beatles first being introduced to pot by Bob Dylan, or that Martha My Dear was about Paul's sheepdog?).  Here's what he said about writing Mother Nature's Son: if you went about a mile from where we lived, you would suddenly be in rural Lancashire, and it was as if you'd fallen off the end of the Earth.  It was all woods and streams and fields of golden corn waving -- everything you love about the countryside.  There was a lot of bird life there because, in those days, things were more or less organic.  They just hadn't quite got round to buying expensive pesticides and fertilizers, nature was much more in balance...I was living in London and imagining it, trying to think like a country boy.  Mother Nature's son.  

     I read those books with a mix of both fascination and letdown, as if watching a magician explain all of the illusions   Ah but that's what a new year does, it causes us to look back and remember, and often to remember fondly.  But why is that, and how does that work.  In the case of Alzheimer's, it often doesn't, at least not fully.  Wrote an article in Discover: Largely responsible for learning and making memories, a well-tuned hippocampus is required for retrieving data on everything from current world leaders to the contents of our bedroom closets.  However, memories that stretch into one's past are often housed in other parts of the brain outside the hippocampus, in the neocortex which spares them from the disease's initial blows.  “Alzheimer's disease first affects the areas of the brain responsible for forming new memories," says Rita Guerreiro, a neurogeneticist at the Van Andel Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research group based in Michigan.  "People living with Alzheimer's disease may hold onto old memories for some time after the onset of the disease.”  But as the disease progresses, memory loss can worsen.***   

     Dang, why all this depressing medical talk about stuff that may or may not happen, especially if what the future holds is perhaps...not there?  Can we return to a another time, return to a better life?  IS there another life?  Part of these thoughts could be that to me at least, the arrival of a new year or another birthday simply means that I'm a bit older which means (as one comedian put it) a lifetime warranty is no longer that big a deal.  With all that is, and has been, going around --from viruses to wars, to pollution and warming seas-- I consider myself fortunate to be witnessing another year, heck even another day.  None of us know the actual time of our demise, only that at some point, it's coming.  As James Bond creator, Ian Fleming once said: You start to die the moment you are born.  The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death.  So take it easy.  This is a chance to make this a year of change, to give back and to give of yourself.  As neuroscientist David J. Linden wrote after receiving his diagnosis of terminal heart cancer: I am not a person of faith, but as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories and their ultimately neurobiological roots.  I’m not sure whether, in the end, faith in afterlife/ reincarnation stories is a feature or a bug of human cognition, but if it’s a bug, it’s one for which I have sympathy.  After all, how wonderfully strange would it be to return as a manatee or a tapeworm?  Well said; let's just hope that the neurotoxic pesticide carbofuran, still used by many illegal growers of cannabis, will be gone by then.

*As we have for the past few years, my wife and I tend to avoid the gift mentality of the holidays by simply asking our friends and family to give to charity in lieu of giving something to us.  One company we liked during the holiday giving period was the online pet supplier Chewy which, if you purchased something for an animal shelter from the company, would match the purchase by giving the same to another charitable group...to date, Chewy has donated 61 million pounds of pet food and $97 million in pet supplies.

**Dr, Linden was diagnosed with synovial sarcoma in his heart. As he wrote when given the diagnosis after a routine exam (he felt fine and exercised regularly without any symptoms or shortness of breath):  I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe.  Heart cancer?  Who the hell gets heart cancer?!  Is this some kind of horrible metaphor?  This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues?  I simply couldn’t accept it.  I was so mad, I could barely see...

***No such memory loss for one man who had a night on the town, but perhaps too good a night, wrote Discover.  A quick trip to the "white throne" offered little relief and before long he was in an ambulance.  His throwing up had caused chest pain, a rapid heartrate, and intense sweating.  But this wasn't a heart attack but something almost worse, a tear in his esophagus: An esophageal tear is a life-threatening event.  Untreated, it is almost always fatal.  Cancer of the heart, esophageal tears?  What other balancing acts are our bodies performing?  This year, as with any year, be grateful for your health, vaccinated or not.  Your body already has enough to do...