Implanted Idea(l)s

Image: Semnic/Shutterstock 

     We seem to live in a world of numbers, a world of statistics and counts.  One example was the LRB report on the recent climate summit, COP26.  Such events draw dignitaries and government spokespeople, similar to economic meetings such as the G7 and G20 summits.  So I figured if you added a few hundred countries plus, their delegates or whatever. (not counting security), you may reach a number shy of 5-7,000, or that would have been my guess.  I was wrong.  Here's how reporter Jenny Turner described it: The​ COPs are by far the biggest meetings in the UN system, and COP26 really was enormous, with nearly forty thousand delegates registered by the UNFCCC.  From the outside, it’s a sealed campus made up from three events venues --the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, the Ovo Hydro and the Armadillo-- linked together, with a temporary structure built over the car park as big again as all three.  On the inside, it’s like an airport, concourse after concourse flanked by dull, expensive eateries, huge screens, rooms with guards behind partitions, potted plants. 

     40,000 delegates.  Delegates!  Now throw in a world of nearly 8 billion people, along with budgets that spend trillions.  And now this from WIRED: In 2020 alone, some 64.2 zettabytes of data were created or replicated.  Put in perspective: one zettabyte alone could fill about 1,000 data centers.  So who on Earth would store so much data (okay, besides governments and countries)?  Well, take this story from WIRED on how to (or at least how to attempt to) delete your Facebook account: Deleting the app from your phone?  Cathartic, maybe, but functionally useless.  Deactivating your Facebook account?  A little better, in that you mostly disappear from the platform, but it still holds onto all your data, waiting patiently and indefinitely for your return.  The article then takes you through a rather convoluted set of steps, including downloading enough data to fill most older laptops, and doing enough to make you feel that you've successfully removed at least that part of your information; then the article adds: The company says it could take 90 days to actually delete all your account’s data, and that it might hold onto some of it anyway in “backup storage” that it keeps on hand for recovery purposes.  But this is as deleted as you can get.  

     Depressing?  Surprising?  Okay, what about this from Esquire, which talked about all of the conservation efforts most of us take to reduce our consumption of water, and plastic, and energy; you know, those low-flush toilets and reusable grocery bags?  All of that, said the piece, "is a side dish in a king's feast..."  So it asked: How much of our freshwater consumption can we attribute to individual human households each year?  The USGS (US Geological Service) found that 12 percent of American water use went to "public supply," and not even all of that went to residential use.  Nearly all the rest went to agriculture, industry, and power generation...Meanwhile, the vast majority of the plastic in the ocean is not from individual consumption.  A Greenpeace study found that 70 percent of it --like, say, in the infamous Pacific Trash Continent-- is from discarded commercial fishing equipment.  You think the turtles have a straw problem?  Try nets.  And that's just water and plastic...think of fuel and heat and energy just as a start.  The Environmental Protection Agency has published a whole list of water-saving initiatives for individual households (continued the article).  Fine, okay, but really?  As in our debates around the existence of billionaires, we're suffering here for our innumeracy and for the human mind's struggle to grasp such staggering differences in scale.

     Ah, so that's what it is, differences in scale.  The libertarian Cato Institute reported that the U.S. still has 750 military bases outside of the U.S.  Said part of the article: Washington has nearly three times as many bases as embassies and consulates.  America also has three times as many installations as all other countries combined.  119 in Germany?  54 in Guam?  34 in Puerto Rico?  Add to all of that our throwing into landfills nearly a billon TONS of food each year.  How can we grasp such numbers, or even believe if they're accurate?  And does it matter?  In the case of the wasted and discarded food, it was too much for one chef, Massimo Bottura.  Said a piece in TIME about his co-creation (with Lara Gilmore) of Food for Soul: The brightest gems in Bottura’s culinary empire are not restaurants at all.  They are soup kitchens.  Not that Bottura would call them that.  He thinks of them as catalysts, venues that not only reaffirm the dignity of the guests, but also draw light and art into neglected neighborhoods, all while focusing attention on the growing global food-waste crisis by turning foods destined for landfill into Michelin Guide–worthy meals.  “A Refettorio is not a soup kitchen,” says Bottura.  “It is a cultural project that shares beauty.  We treat our guests like we do at our restaurants.  That’s the warm hug we are giving.  We are saying ‘Welcome, this is a beautiful place, and it’s your place.  This is the food that we cook for you.  We are here for you.’ ”

    As you're likely aware, the continuing war in Ukraine is exposing just how connected are with one another, especially when it comes to commodities such as energy and metals, not to mention food.  Russia is a big supplier of aluminum (one of the imports still not sanctioned and also part of the reason your packaged canned goods --including pet food and sodas-- are increasing in price), a metal Bloomberg described in this way before the invasion of Ukraine: Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones.  Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years.  If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.  This later report (from 02/16/2022) showed another side of our fickle understanding of such commodities: Despite a booming job market, consumer sentiment is extremely low.  And the popular thing to claim is that it's because real wages are down and people are falling behind.  Except maybe that's not true.  As my colleague Katia Dmitrieva reports, there's new research from the Dallas Fed which shows that real average hourly earnings are in fact up since the start of the pandemic.  Measuring real wages is somewhat tricky, because there have been so many compositional changes to the labor market (people quit jobs and get new ones) that it's hard to get a pure apples-to-apples measure.  Nonetheless, there's a good reason to think the common story about wages not keeping up is wrong.  On the other hand, people are still unhappy.  This might suggest a far simpler explanation: they just don't like rising prices period, regardless of whether their personal earnings have kept up...As George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group notes, sentiment about the economy tracks pretty closely with the so-called Misery Index, which just crudely adds inflation and unemployment together.  When either inflation or unemployment spike, people express displeasure about the state of the economy...So basically if you say something like "real wages are falling," there's a good chance that all you're saying is that the price of gasoline is going up.  Even if it's true that overall people are keeping up, they don't like to pay more, hence the White House messaging on getting prices down.

    Ah-ha, the Misery Index.  So wait, are we really that miserable because of what we pay at the pump or at the grocery store?  Really, all while people in Ukraine (and many other countries) are simply longing for a return to a life that once seemed very ordinary but had now changed into a fight simply to survive?  Okay, I'm being a bit harsh...so let's jump to parents?  Said an article by Gary Shteyngart (again from Esquire): Many people I know have parents who are suffering from Early Fox News Dementia, ranting about the perfidy of Anthony Fauci and the possibility of catching critical race theory from an open jar of mayonnaise.  But at the same time, they want to give their children parental advice and guidance, though now through the prism of their separate bespoke realities...For so many of my friends in their forties, no achievement has been sanctified until their parents have signed off and thereby made it real.  But for so many of them, that affirmation will never come...My parents won’t get vaccinated against Covid, in part because, in addition to Fox News, they watch Russian state television, which tells them Pfizer and Moderna may kill them or cause lethal allergies or blood clots or who knows what.  How can I be angry at anything they've done to me, including the time spent with that asthma energy healer, when they are now using the same misconceived advice to rob themselves of their golden years?  But they're parents, just ordinary people trying their best to raise their children as best they can, right?  And in the end maybe we're all parents, children or not, working with what we have and trying to make sense of it all.

     Which brings me to our brains.  Make a paper cut or get a splinter and the reaction is instant, your nerves sending that painful signal to your brain at 30 meters a second.  But is that signal electrical in nature, or mechanical (what??).  Jumping back to a 2019 article in Scientific American, author Douglas Fox wrote that early physicists argued that nerves react to shock waves: Textbook diagrams portray cell membranes as thin, passive sheets of insulation wrapped around pipelike nerve fibers.  But physicists are starting to realize that cell membranes have surprising properties.  They belong to a class of materials known as piezo-electrics, which can convert mechanical forces into electric forces and vice versa.  Blah, blah, blah...so what's the point?  The issue being discussed in the article was the use of anesthesia and, even to this day, how little of how anesthesia works makes any sense.  Apply enough of a shock or a change in pressure and any anesthesia wears off, as shown in this experiment done in 1942: They used two different anesthetics, ethanol and urethane, (wait, ethanol as in gasoline and urethane as in varnish?...well, not quite) to inebriate tadpoles to the point that they stopped swimming.  Then the scientists put the animals in a hyperbaric chamber and raised the pressure to 136 times that of the atmosphere.  The anesthetic effect vanished: the tadpoles resumed swimming.  When the pressure was lowered, the animals again fell motionless...If mechanical waves help to open and close ion channels, that could profoundly change our understanding of the brain, because firing neurons mediate all thinking.  Ion channels are notoriously noisy and jittery: even tiny thermal vibrations can cause them to pop open or close randomly.  Information theorists have struggled for decades to explain how the brain can achieve reliable cognition using such unreliable channels.

     In 1935, Rose Macaulay wrote a series of essays she titled Personal Pleasures, a rebellion against trying to fall sleep by reading such subjects as history.  "You will never, I maintain, get to sleep on Shakespeare," she is quoted in a LRB review: The succession of meditations and jeux d'esprit in Personal Pleasures has just that capacity she recommends to 'hold your attention gently on the page', to amuse and interest without disturbance, to soothe without blandness, until sleep approaches.  Here is how Macaulay put that slow descent into that fog of sleepiness: the dark bed, like a gentle pool of water, receives you; you sink into its encompassing arms, floating down the wandering trail of a dream, as down some straying river that softly twists and slides...now dipping darkly into blind waves, now emerging, lit with the odd, phosphorescent light of oneiric reason, unsearchable and dark to waking eyes.  

     How is it that we dream while falling asleep naturally, but not under anesthesia?  For that matter, I found that I almost never dreamed when I had the rare occasion to take Ambien on a long flight, or tried melatonin several times.  But how is it that when we do dream, things like our parents or childhood or past jobs (or often pure nonsense) sometimes enter the picture.  How much is embedded in our brains like shrapnel, memories scarred over and accessible only in limited amounts and not always how we "remember"?   I dream a lot, as in a lot.  I used to write them down but it often took too long, filling 3 pages or so until I tired of making so many notes about conversations in the dream, or unrecognizable people, or how the dreams shifted into yet another dream and sometimes dreams within dreams (gasp).  Sometimes I would take L-serine, an amino acid said to slow the advance of early Alzheimers (written about in an earlier post); but boy did that particular amino acid send my dreams into overdrive.  Colors and images way beyond the ordinary, at least in my experience...and I was asleep!  But that amino acid did knock me out...so how did that work?  It was an anesthetic of a sort (by knocking me out) yet it seemed to increase my dreaming...the opposite of what both botanists and physicists seemed to be concluding.  

    It's not often that I save an article.  Certainly there are those I've saved which have yet to be read; but rarely do I keep an article once read.  An exception came from a piece in 2006 by Kira Salak and her journey down the Amazon and into the world of ayahuasca: It was as if I'd been shown my own self-imposed hells and taught how to free myself from them.  What was really going on?  According to Grob, (Dr. Charles Grob, professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Pediatrics at UCLA) ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary "ego disintegration," as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds -- a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.  "You come back with images, messages, even communications," he explains.  "You're learning about yourself, reconceptualizing prior experiences.  Having had a profound psycho-spiritual epiphany, you're not the same person you were before."  But the curious should take heed: The unconscious mind holds many things you don't want to look at.  All those self-destructive beliefs, suppressed traumatic events, denied emotions.  Little wonder that an ayahuasca vision can reveal itself as a kind of hell in which a person is forced --literally-- to face his or her demons.  "Ayahuasca is not for everyone," Grob warns.  "It's probably not for most people in our world today.  You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary.  You have to be willing to withstand that."  Salak was just 33 at the time, her article appearing in National Geographic's short-lived offshoot, Adventure magazine (it lasted 10 years).  

     I'm not sure why I kept, or still keep, the article.  I've never tried ayahuasca, even as domestic "shamans" now seem to be appearing in places such as Manhattan and maybe coming to a city near you.  Perhaps it was because of what Salak concluded, a sentiment that still seems to echo my learnings* and insights and discoveries no matter how much I read or watch or listen: Me.  I'm ready to go home.  I sit up with difficulty, as if waking from decades of sleep.  It would be easier for me to call it all a dream, a grand hallucination.  Then I could have my old world back, in which I thought I knew what was real and unreal, true and untrue.  Now the problem is, I don't know anything.

*Not being a cattle person, I asked my wife why bully sticks --those dog treats that are actually, well, you know-- so expensive.  Pizzle, she replied, they come from bulls.  Okay, I sort of knew that but weren't bulls used for breeding and were there really that many bulls in a herd?  Well most are castrated, she told me, as in the famous Rocky Mountain Oysters.  And I sort of knew that as well, having written a fun song on the famous "testicle festival."  But at that point they're no longer called bulls.  Wait, what's the difference between a cow and a heifer, or a bull and a steer?  And don't even bring up the term ox (yes, they're all actually cows).  To a cowhand, those terms are as clear as pulling water from thin air (oops, already being done, said Men's Journal).  See what I mean about always learning...