Cognitive dissonance of chinese nouveau riche

A colleague mentioned few years ago during casual pet-lovers chit chat, she has a cat which she had rescued. I kept nodding until I realized what she meant by "rescue". During a visit to China, she went out for dinner and before the menu arrived, she saw a few weeks old kitten in a cage. When she inquired, the waiter was delighted to offer her different "feline" dishes. Appalled, she offered to buy the kitten "live" (which, by the way was a higher charge than the meal) and eventually took the kitten out of the country after the customary nuisance at the customs.

The irony is China is a country where for centuries where vegetarianism was (and still is) preached as a virtue but yet, this is the country where anything that moves are delightfully devoured or powdered for "placebo healing". It's hard to imagine what will happen when China starts emulating the American flesh industry (can IVF meat succeed where even Buddha failed?). Of-course they still eat dogs and now the nauseating cognitive dissonance is, with the exponential growth of their economy, they are paying $600,000 for pet dogs - just to show off their riches.

"Pet ownership is booming in a nation where dogs and cats are featured as part of meals and animal abuse remains widespread. But none carries the cachet of the Tibetan Mastiff, one of the largest dog breeds, which can weigh 180 pounds.

Last month, a Nanjing breeder paid $234,000 for his purebred pooch, reported the Yangtze Evening Times. In September, a young woman in Xian paid $600,000 for her pet, according to the Xian Evening News. Both led airport welcomes with long convoys of pricey automobiles.

"It's like gambling, as people think they can earn large sums from expensive dogs, but the reality is that it's very hard to breed a top quality purebred Tibetan Mastiff," Beijing breeder Zhao Yanjun says.

Others buy to show off their status. "Like men around the world, Chinese like to own big dogs as it shows 'I am successful, I want to dominate more women and big dogs,' " Zhao says.

In the USA, $5,000 is the upper limit for a show quality puppy, says Martha Feltenstein, president of the American Tibetan Mastiff Association. In China, prices have leapt this year amid a nationwide "Tibetan Mastiff fever" that shows little sign of cooling."

"Ma is still trying to represent his country by pushing for China's full membership in the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), the World Canine Organization. It's a tough sell, Ma admits, as the FCI is concerned by China's low level of vaccinations, the culling of dogs to prevent rabies and the eating of dog meat.

Those worries are well-justified, says Jeff He, China communication manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), an advocacy group. Culling continues in some areas, he says, even though vaccination and education are more effective. "The No. 1 threat to companion animals is the lack of animal welfare legislation in this country," he says.

Respect for animal rights is growing, says Qin Xiaona, chairwoman of Beijing's Capital Animal Welfare Association, but the absence of laws slows progress, she says. Last month, Qin rushed to nearby Tianjin to help rescue 800 mostly stolen cats that were locked in cages en route to diners in south China's Guangzhou."

Science of Success

One of the most amazing power of the ongoing genome research et al is at times it reinstates some of the old wisdom and sometimes it completely rewrites the stereotypes and conventional wisdome we are imbibed in.
Starting for religion, caste, fedualism, Darwin, DNA, Blank Slate and human genome project, its been an evolving process and there isn't an end in sight of discovering why and how we become who we are. Ever since the human genome project, there seems to a consensus as well disparity between all these ideas. Cacophony of current political scene and all the fancy economic theories are primed to balance the imbalance in the evolutionary lottery - our genes. Paradoxically, geneome studies have been pointing to an alternate direction - Genome Plasticity. Success is not only defined by birth but by nuture (and ad infinitum). David Dobbs chronicles the ground breaking research of Marian Bakermans Kranenburg - Orchid Hypothesis (audio):

"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

The evidence for this view is mounting. Much of it has existed for years, in fact, but the focus on dysfunction in behavioral genetics has led most researchers to overlook it. This tunnel vision is easy to explain, according to Jay Belsky, a child-development psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. “Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability,” he told me recently. “They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet.”

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

This orchid hypothesis also answers a fundamental evolutionary question that the vulnerability hypothesis cannot. If variants of certain genes create mainly dysfunction and trouble, how have they survived natural selection? Genes so maladaptive should have been selected out. Yet about a quarter of all human beings carry the best-documented gene variant for depression, while more than a fifth carry the variant that Bakermans-Kranenburg studied, which is associated with externalizing, antisocial, and violent behaviors, as well as ADHD, anxiety, and depression. The vulnerability hypothesis can’t account for this. The orchid hypothesis can.

This is a transformative, even startling view of human frailty and strength. For more than a decade, proponents of the vulnerability hypothesis have argued that certain gene variants underlie some of humankind’s most grievous problems: despair, alienation, cruelties both petty and epic. The orchid hypothesis accepts that proposition. But it adds, tantalizingly, that these same troublesome genes play a critical role in our species’ astounding success.

The orchid hypothesis—sometimes called the plasticity hypothesis, the sensitivity hypothesis, or the differential-susceptibility hypothesis—is too new to have been tested widely. Many researchers, even those in behavioral science, know little or nothing of the idea. A few—chiefly those with broad reservations about ever tying specific genes to specific behaviors—express concerns. But as more supporting evidence emerges, the most common reaction to the idea among researchers and clinicians is excitement. A growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists, child-development experts, geneticists, ethologists, and others are beginning to believe that, as Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it, “It’s time to take this seriously.”"

David Dobbs has a phenomenal personal story to tell as well:

"Suomi, Lesch, and NIH colleague J. Dee Higley set about doing a type of study now recognized as a classic “gene-by-environment” study. First they took cerebral spinal fluid from 132 juvenile rhesus monkeys and analyzed it for a serotonin metabolite, called 5-HIAA, that’s considered a reliable indicator of how much serotonin the nervous system is processing. Lesch’s studies had already shown that depressed people with the short/long serotonin-transporter allele had lower 5-HIAA levels, reflecting less-efficient serotonin processing. He and Suomi wanted to see if the finding would hold true in monkeys. If it did, it would provide more evidence for the genetic dynamic shown in Lesch’s studies. And finding such a dynamic in rhesus monkeys would confirm their value as genetic and behavioral models for studying human behavior.

After Suomi, Lesch, and Higley had grouped the monkeys’ 5-HIAA levels according to their serotonin genotype (short/long or long/long, but not short/short, which was too rare to be of use), they also sorted the results by whether the monkeys had been raised by their mothers or as orphans with only same-aged peers. When their colleague Allison Bennett charted the results on a bar graph showing 5-HIAA levels, all of the mother-reared monkeys, no matter which allele they had, showed serotonin processing in the normal range. The metabolite levels of the peer-raised monkeys, however, diverged sharply by genotype: the short/long monkeys in that group processed serotonin highly inefficiently (a risk factor for depression and anxiety), whereas the long/long monkeys processed it robustly. When Suomi saw the results, he realized that he finally had proof of a behaviorally relevant gene-by-environment interaction in his monkeys. “I took one look at that graph,” he told me, “and said, ‘Let’s go pop some champagne.’”

Suomi and Lesch published their results in 2002 in Molecular Psychiatry, a relatively new journal about behavioral genetics. The paper formed part of a surge of gene-by-environment studies of mood and behavioral disorders. That same year, two psychologists at King’s College, London, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, published the first of two large longitudinal studies (both drawing on life histories of hundreds of New Zealanders) that would prove particularly influential. The first, published in Science, showed that the short allele of another major neurotransmitter-processing gene (known as the MAOA gene) sharply increased the chance of antisocial behavior in human adults who’d been abused as children. The second, in 2003 and also in Science, showed that people with short/short or short/long serotonin-transporter alleles, if exposed to stress, faced a higher-than-normal risk of depression.

Suomi made another remarkable discovery. He and others assayed the serotonin-transporter genes of seven of the 22 species of macaque, the primate genus to which the rhesus monkey belongs. None of these species had the serotonin-transporter polymorphism that Suomi was beginning to see as a key to rhesus monkeys’ flexibility. Studies of other key behavioral genes in primates produced similar results; according to Suomi, assays of the SERT gene in other primates studied to date, including chimps, baboons, and gorillas, turned up “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The science is young, and not all the data is in. But so far, among all primates, only rhesus monkeys and human beings seem to have multiple polymorphisms in genes heavily associated with behavior. “It’s just us and the rhesus,” Suomi says.

This discovery got Suomi thinking about another distinction we share with rhesus monkeys. Most primates can thrive only in their specific environments. Move them and they perish. But two kinds, often called “weed” species, are able to live almost anywhere and to readily adapt to new, changing, or disturbed environments: human beings and rhesus monkeys. The key to our success may be our weediness. And the key to our weediness may be the many ways in which our behavioral genes can vary.

Even if you accept that orchid genes may grant us flexibility crucial to our success, it can be startling to ponder their dynamics up close and personal. After I FedExed away my vial of saliva for genotyping, I told myself more or less to forget it. To my surprise, I managed to. The e-mail that eventually arrived with the results, promised for a Monday, turned up three days early, during a Friday evening when I was simultaneously half-watching Monsters, Inc. with my kids and distractedly scanning the messages on my iPhone. At first I didn’t really register what I was reading.
“David,” the message began. “I ran the assay on the DNA from your saliva sample today. The assay ran well and your genotype is S/S. Good thing neither of us think of these things as deterministic or even having a fixed valence. Let me know if you want to talk about your result or genetic issues.”
When I finished reading the message, the house seemed quieter, though it was not. As I looked out the window at our pear tree, its blossoms fallen but its fruit only nubbins, I felt a chill spread through my torso.
I hadn’t thought it would matter.
Yet as I sat absorbing this information, the chill came to seem less the coldness of fear than a shiver of abrupt and inverted self-knowledge—of suddenly knowing with certainty something I had long suspected, and finding that it meant something other than I thought it would. The orchid hypothesis suggested that this particular allele, the rarest and riskiest of the serotonin-transporter gene’s three variants, made me not just more vulnerable but more plastic. And that new way of thinking changed things. I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience—every intervention I ran on myself, as it were—would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard—slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same.

I don’t plan to have any of my other key behavioral genes assayed. I don’t plan on having my kids’ genes done, either. What would it tell me? That I shape them in every encounter? I know this. Yet I do like thinking that when I take my son trolling for salmon, or listen to his younger brother’s labyrinthine elaborations of his dreams, or sing “Sweet Betsy of Pike” with my 5-year-old daughter as we drive home from the lake, I’m flipping little switches that can help light them up. I don’t know what all those switches are—and I don’t need to. It’s enough to know that together we can turn them on."

This changes everything, no one can find solace and excuse from their faulty gene - Dr.Fallon didn't become a psychopath and David Dobbs has never been affected with manic depression.

A talk with Jonah Lehrer

One of the best books of the year was "How we decide" by Jonah Lehrer and here is his talk (earlier talk on edge here), he mentions the famous Somatic Markers Hypothesis card experiment :





Our brain is such a fascinating piece of fluffy flesh and god knows what all its gonna unveil in years to come.

One of the famous lines ever in movie history is from Gone with the wind - "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."
Now, check out the next line (which happens to be the last line of the movie) from Scarlett in response to the above lines after he walks away - "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow."
I think, these lines have lots of neuroscience to it that famous lines. No?

Benefits of Appreciative Thinking

It's a western issue and to be more specific, its an American issue. It's a quintessential residue (which is a gross  understatement) when the essence of "self-reliance" is misused or misunderstood (earlier post here). In other words it's hard for some people to appreciate ideas of others (esp. grand ones not the routine chorus at work) and it's evident from the scarcity of role models in this country and overabundance of contrarians offering no alternatives except lots of ad hominem. Trust me, its frustrating since some people think they know everything (Epistemological Modesty, anybody?) and they dwell on this fallacy by constant criticism, which is self-depreciating and of-course they are oblivious to that fact and thrive in their phantasmagorical creation feeling omnipotent. I cannot even begin to write these experiences since there are so many and worse, lot of otherwise very nice people dwell on this fallacy. Having the privilege of influenced by both east and west, this fallacy seems obvious from my perspective but it might not for someone without a dose of eastern thoughts or well .. the good old self-reflection, metacognition. Seth has a fantastic post, most of it targetting the academic circles but the last line vindicates my hypothesis:

"To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking.When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as:

1. What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?
2. How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Do it show a better way to do something?
3. Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?
4. Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?
5. What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?

That sort of thing. In my experience few papers are worthless. But I’ve heard lots of papers called worthless.

The overemphasis — the total emphasis — on critical thinking has big and harmful consequences on graduate students. At Berkeley, in a weekly seminar called Animal Behavior Lunch, we would discuss a recent animal behavior paper. The dozen-odd graduate students could only find fault. Out of hundreds and hundreds of comments, I cannot remember a single positive one from a graduate student. Sometimes a faculty member would intervene: “Let’s not be too negative. . . . ” But week after week it kept happening. Relentless negativity caused trouble for the graduate students because every plan of their own that they thought of, they placed too much emphasis on what was wrong with it. Trying to overcome the problems, their research became too big and complicated. For example, they ran control groups before obtaining the basic effect. They had been very poorly taught — by all those professors who taught critical thinking."

One of the most obvious message from Malcom Galdwell's (irrespective of our love/hate relationship with Galdwell) Outliers was "No one in the history of the world has reached the top alone." (Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, "not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone".)

Robert Sapolsky - The Uniqueness Of Humans

Thanks - Oh my god!!, after listening to Robert Sapolsky's talk few days ago and instantly becoming his fan, this speech is phenomenal. What we can infer from reading like 20 books, has been delivered in this 37 minute talk.





My thoughts on what makes us unique are here and in a weird sense it does overlap with Sapolsky's answer.

9/11 hero cloned!!

Wonder why I love bio-tech albeit the caution it evokes?

Before becoming a moralist, we need to be pragmatic and get ready to face the reality with good dose of skepticism, only after educating ourselves in at-least basics of biotech.
Since we like it or not, we as a civilization are going to take a route which has never been ventured before.
Michael Sandel's lecture is great place.


now, Ronald Bailey's wisdom...:

Life's lessons from stray dogs

Painter Aruna Nene has an exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai and yes, she paints stray dogs, a tranquil beauty of the serene slumber in a place like Mumbai.

"Stray dogs are so much a part of our daily life but we hardly take notice of them, says Nashik-based artist Aruna Nene who has painted the canines in acrylic on canvas.The paintings capture stray dogs in various moods at different locations that could well be any spot anywhere in Mumbai. While a pensive-looking brown dog slumbers on a footpath layered with paver blocks, another catches snoozes on a carpet of grass.
Amidst the grind of daily life, Nene, an animal lover, says she took time to stand and stare at dogs that “know to live better than us humans”. “Whenever I visited Mumbai and travelled by its local trains, I would often see people running along, forever in a tearing hurry to get to their destinations. And right there, these stray dogs would lounge comfortably without any trouble whatsoever,” says Nene who hails from a family of defence personnel. And Nene says we can learn a thing or two from dogs.
“We are forever racing through life, the list of our chores never ends. But where we are headed?” she asks. “In contrast, these dogs seem so content despite the fact that they possess nothing.”
The phrase ‘dog’s life’ takes on a new meaning when you see these dogs, says Nene who will donate the proceeds of the exhibition sales to the Parel Animal hospital."

It seems like an elitist act when India needs better things to be done but this need not be a zero-sum game. Caring about stray dogs has nothing to do with poverty in India and both can be handled and they are mutually exclusive (and in-fact poor people are the ones care for the strays more than anyone else). The lessons from history has taught us humanitarianism started as a elitist propaganda since sometimes they happen to see the forest when masses gets lost in the trees.  Living in India, I got used to and worse became oblivious to it albeit the omnipresent stray dogs. My genome has all the traits to rationalize it and even give deplorable talks, masquerading our short comings in "humor". Things changed after Max and a mere look at a stray dog, sky rocketed the anxiety level and for once, neurotransmitters did their job. There are some of great ideas - here and great acts - old age home for dogs:

"A Chennaite has done that precisely. Forty-two-year-old Ashok has set up an 'old age home-cum-permanent shelter' for abandoned dogs and cats at Injambakkam near Chennai. "It is already functional but the formal inauguration is on January 7," says Ashok, a professional dog trainer. "I have always been an animal lover right from childhood,” he adds.He had set up a temporary shelter for dogs, Benji's Dog Academy at Injambakkam eight years back. The present home is about 4000 sq feet.
"I have about 80 dogs and nine cats," says Ashok who bought the property and set up separate enclosures for the animals with his money. There is also a pet cemetery. He spent about Rs seven lakh for the property and building. Dogs have to be treated with love and affection. This home allows them to live their life in peace and dignity. You should have the heart to take care of them"

Peter Singer's philosophy is right and it will take few more generations since civilization is an on-going process and at the current state it will seem ludicrous to most. We cannot make the world a better place for these animals with one single stroke but we have the power to make the world inside our homes a much better place for them. A reader comment about caring for animals after Pepper's story says it all:

"I have a child with insulin-dependent diabetes. I am constantly aware that every single advance keeping her not only alive, but so healthy that others never notice her condition, rests on the shoulders of thousands upon thousands of creatures. These animals have suffered, and these animals feel pain as much as we; many are almost unbearably intelligent and are emotionally...sweet, endearing. It is for this reason that I keep lab rats and greyhounds as pets--a small thanks that cannot go nearly far enough, and an act which has only made me simultaneously more grateful and sadder for the involuntary plight of the laboratory animal."

It's impossible to pay back what animals went and go through each minute to make our lives better and making the life of one stray dog a little better is the least we can do.

Learning to love the reality

but yet not only keeping a dream alive but even fueling the dream with it. Here's again a small clip of Agassi talking about his epiphany.





It reminds of a thoughtful piece written by Po Bronson - "What should I do with my life?", something which we should reflect on at-least once in a while without getting lost in the whirlpool of cacophony.

"What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously. They think that it's a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to "find themselves," or so the myth goes.
But I found that just about anybody can find this question important. It's not just for free agents, knowledge workers, and serial entrepreneurs. I met many working-class people who found this question essential. They might have fewer choices, but they still care. Take Bart Handford. He went from working the graveyard shift at a Kimberley-Clark baby-wipes plant in Arkansas to running the Department of Agriculture's rural-development program. He didn't do this by just pulling up his bootstraps. His breakthrough came when his car was hit by a train, and he spent six months in bed exploring The Question.
Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path means closing a door forever.
"Keeping your doors open" is a trap. It's an excuse to stay uninvolved. I call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers. They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling like observers, feeling as if they haven't come close to living up to their potential."

nice but the most brilliant lines were...:

"Shouldn't I make money first -- to fund my dream? The notion that there's an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn't find any.

Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world -- and psychologically adapted to it -- that you don't really want to ditch it."

What I've been reading

Tyler Cowen's review made me pickup The Persistence of Poverty by Charles Karles and yeah, it was a wild wild ride. Any moderately well off person with active mirror neuron system will be puzzled and appalled by the persistence of poverty with no end in sight esp. in a rich country like USA leave alone Africa. We shouldn't be a relativist when it comes to understanding poverty since just by comparing African poverty we should never neglect the poverty in developed world (learnt that slowly after coming to this country) and the purpose of this book is not African poverty where mere survival is at stake. Its about poverty where survival is not at stake but about a condition where life becomes worse than death and about the political ramifications on controlling it.

Five common reason why poor remain poor are:

• Not working
• Not getting education
• No saving
• Alcoholism
• Taking risks with law.

and why they act irrationally by acting against their ticket out of poverty? or is it completely rational from their perspective? Karles builds a case for his hypothesis, whether the actions of poor rational or irrational, if so who is responsible or why any of the existing policys make little progress? And his hypothesis -  It makes sense to help poor who are on verge of success (who are more motivated to succeed) rather than poorest of the poor who need the most but aren't motived enough to succeed as they should have been. I loved his theory and it makes sense to help more the people who will succeed sooner and join the otherside to rescue more poor out of poverty and cycle can continue until an equilibrim is reached. It sounds fabulous on paper but ... try fine tuning this theory in Washington.. I hope someone in congress looks into this. I am optimistic, since the Cass Sustein and Richard Thaler (of Nudge fame) are now very influential in White House and not long ago they were unknown to the world except the academic circles ( they are now number 7 on top global thinkers).
Until the dreams comes true, we have Malcom Gladwell and the advantages of underprivileged.

Follow up on Hygeine Hypothesis, Symbiosis, Parasites et al

This theory is up there with grand unified theory, God debate etc and honestly, its going to take more than our lifetime to uncover and comprehend completely and its understatement. Nonetheless, its fascinating and will have far reaching consequences which we cannot even begin to envisage. So, for the ease of following, I am going to club the microbes and parasites albeit the utility of microbes has more positive but as per these evolving theories both have a profound impact on who we are (earlier posts - here, here, and here).

Edge has great talk on now famous, "Toxo - The Parasite in the Brain" by Robert Sapolsky explaning how it makes mamalians attracted to felines and also how uniquely it is capable of identifying and disabling just one specific fear circuit in amygdala, which till date no neuroscientists hasn't be able to do.

"The first thing we did was introduce Toxo into a rat and it took about six weeks for it to migrate from its gut up into its nervous system. And at that point, we looked to see, where has it gone in the brain? It formed cysts, sort of latent, encapsulated cysts, and it wound up all over the brain. That was deeply disappointing.

But then we looked at how much winds up in different areas in the brain, and it turned out Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala is where you do your fear conditioning; the amygdala is what's hyperactive in people with post-traumatic stress disorder; the amygdala is all about pathways of predator aversion, and Toxo knows how to get in there.

Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety. That's really interesting. That doesn't tell us a thing about why only its predator aversion has been knocked outwhereas fear of bright lights, et cetera, is still in there. It knows how to find that particular circuitry.

So what's going on from there? What's it doing? Because it's not just destroying this fear aversive response, it's creating something new. It's creating an attraction to the cat urine. And here is where this gets utterly bizarre. You look at circuitry in the brain, and there's a reasonably well-characterized circuit that activates neurons which become metabolically active circuits where they're talking to each other, a reasonably well-understood process that's involved in predator aversion. It involves neurons in the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and some other brain regions getting excited. This is a very well characterized circuit."

From the above research, he has some enlighting hypothesis...

"On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other's shoulders, and this is not a rare pattern. Look at the rabies virus; rabies knows more about aggression than we neuroscientists do. It knows how to make you rabid. It knows how to make you want to bite someone, and that saliva of yours contains rabies virus particles, passed on to another person.

The Toxo story is, for me, completely new terrain — totally cool, interesting stuff, just in terms of this individual problem. And maybe it's got something to do with treatments for phobias down the line or whatever it is to make it seem like anything more than just the coolest gee whiz thing possible. But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think."

A few years ago, I sat down with a couple of the Toxo docs over in our hospital who do the Toxo testing in the Ob/Gyn clinics. And they hadn't heard about this behavioral story, and I'm going on about how cool and unexpected it is. And suddenly, one of them jumps up, flooded with 40-year-old memories, and says, "I just remembered back when I was a resident, I was doing a surgical transplant rotation. And there was an older surgeon, who said, if you ever get organs from a motorcycle accident death, check the organs for Toxo. I don't know why, but you find a lot of Toxo." And you could see this guy was having a rush of nostalgic memories from back when he was 25 and all because he was being told this weird factoid ... ooh, people who die in motorcycle accidents seem to have high rates of Toxo. Utterly bizarre."

"You want to know something utterly terrifying? Here's something terrifying and not surprising. Folks who know about Toxo and its affect on behavior are in the U.S. military. They're interested in Toxo. They're officially intrigued. And I would think they would be intrigued, studying a parasite that makes mammals perhaps do things that everything in their fiber normally tells them not to because it's dangerous and ridiculous and stupid and don't do it. But suddenly with this parasite on board, the mammal is a little bit more likely you go and do it. Who knows? But they are aware of Toxo."
"There's a long-standing literature that absolutely shows there's a statistical link between Toxo infection and schizophrenia. It's not a big link, but it's solidly there. Schizophrenics have higher than expected rates of having been infected with Toxo, and not particularly the case for other related parasites. Links between schizophrenia and mothers who had house cats during pregnancy. There's a whole literature on that. So where does this fit in?

Two really interesting things. Back to dopamine and the tyrosine hydroxylase gene that Toxo somehow ripped off from mammals, which allows it to make more dopamine. Dopamine levels are too high in schizophrenia. That's the leading suggestion of what schizophrenia is about neurochemically. You take Toxo-infected rodents and their brains have elevated levels of dopamine. Final deal is, and this came from Webster's group, you take a rat who's been Toxo-infected and is now at the state where it would find cat urine to be attractive, and you give it drugs that block dopamine receptors, the drugs that are used to treat schizophrenics, and it stops being attracted to the cat urine. There is some schizophrenia connection here with this."

There you go, that darn dopamine again ... but I will keep my promise. Well, next one is a follow up piece on the microbes, nothing new but now there seems to be an unaminity among the researchers on the humility of "not knowing anything".

"Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies.
Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates.
The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?

Well, all I can say is ... oops  ( and did a tiny "thingee" had hand in making of  Hitler and Gandhi?)