Nurturing Of Adaptive & Fluid Minds

It’s always easier to marshall one’s forces when there is an external threat. The problem with America is the threat is now within itself. The threat is because many refuse to acknowledge the need for change. Exponential technology change is inevitable. Unfortunately, the needed change must be from within our inner mental models.

During WW2, women who had previously been marginalized in the workforce become the manufacturing engine that lead to the country to victory in WW2. As Rommel had warned, prior to the Normandy invasion, “In a man on man fight between comparable opponents, the winner is he who has put one more bullet through the barrel.” He was alluding to the importance on logistics and hence manufacturing to win wars.

This is hard to do for the adult mind. So we must depend on our children. Our investments for our future must be spent on our children and not on preparing for the kinds of war that doesn’t exist anymore. Let’s stop investing in horse-drawn artillery and instead invest more in more adaptive, resourceful and innovative citizenry. This is what happened in WW2, we discarded the past, placed our faith in our people and constructed a new future. We need to do the same again with the emergence of an AI driven economy.

That is, given that our minds are formed through a constructive process and that we need to transcend our static mental models of the “natural order of things”, we must prioritize the nurturing of adaptive and fluid minds in our children. Adaptive and fluid minds are not confused when they discover something new. They are on the contrary, inquisitive and willing to break their existing models so as to achieve an enlightened understanding. Civilization can only make progress if we have these kinds of minds that are comfortable with exponential change.

- More here from Carlos E. Perez

Le Botaniste - CO2 Neutral & Zero Waste Food

In my 25 years in this country, except two (yes, I counted) everyone I know waste food every meal. Every damn meal. 

In restaurants leaving food on the plate unfinished has become a fashion. Even the waiter makes fun of me when they see my clean plate. We live in a crazy trend of being civilized... 

Good to Go app was founded to help reduce restaurant food waste. Their "mission" is nothing fancy - it is how we used to live for centuries but we lost gratitude. 

Interview with CEO, Laurent Francois of Le Botaniste (a restaurant in NYC) to discuss what it means to run a truly sustainable business and get some zero-waste tips from their creative kitchen: 

Tell us about how Le Botaniste’s sustainability aspirations helped shape your menu. Can you share examples of menu items that were born out of sustainable innovation?

Our founder, Alain has a love for innovating and trying to use every little piece of a veggie in the process.

One example: Pulp from our juices are used as bases for our hummus for example, making use of 100% of the beautiful beets or carrots we receive every day!

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Are there any tips to reduce food waste in your kitchens that our readers could implement at home?

Reuse, reuse, reuse: transform something you tend to throw away in something else! Soup, hummus or oven-dried crackers can be great ways to make it happen (we use all parts of the broccoli for example: steaming the florets and transforming the stem into a soup).

I want to add, if any leftover food (say it was spoilt) cannot be reused, please don't throw in the garbage but place it next to a plant or a tree outdoors. 

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. 

- Pleasures of Eating by Wendell Berry

A Death Of An Entire Species - Sapiens Murdered Dodo's

Dodo's never encountered, humans. So once human entered their territory, they didn't fear humans. Big Mistake!

What I've Been Reading

A long historical view not only helps us to keep calm to a "time of trouble" but reminds us that there is an end to the longest tunnel. Even if we can see no good hope ahead, an historical interest as to what will happen is a help in carrying on. For a thinking man, it can be the strongest check on a suicidal feeling. 

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What can the individual learn from history as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving. The importance and intrinsic value of behaving decently. The importance of seeing clearly; not least seeing himself clearly. 

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He may realize that the world is a jungle. But if he has seen that it could be better for anyone if the simple principles of decency and kindliness were generally applied, then he must in honesty try to practice these consistently and to live, personally, as if they were general. In other words, he must follow the right he has seen. 

Why Don't We Learn from History? by B.H Liddell Hart (1944). 

Time for a small rant: How stupid of me for not having read this book for over 3 decades, end rant. And I don't think, I have to say anything more. 

Cost of quantifying history (and not understanding history is both science & art): 

It was the school of German historians, headed by Ranke, who in the last century started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. Any conclusions and generalizations were shunned, and any well-written books become suspect. What was the result? History became too dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely a subject for study by specialists. 

So the void was filled by new myths, of exciting power but appalling consequences. The world has suffered, and Germany worst of all, for the sterilization of history that started in Germany. 

The hardest lesson to learn (caused by societal delusion): 

The most dangerous of all delusions are those that arise from the adulteration of history in the imagined interests of national and military morale. Although this lesson of experience has been the hardest earned, it remains the hardest to learn. Those who have suffered most show their eagerness to suffer more. 

This camouflaged history not only conceals faults and deficiencies that could otherwise be remedied, but engenders false confidence, and false confidence underlies most of the failures that military history records. 

On human nature: 

It was saddening to discover how many apparently honorable men would stoop to almost anything to help their own advancement. 

Loyalty is a noble quality, so long as it is not blind and does not exclude the higher loyalty to truth and decency. 

Faith vs. Truth: 

A realization of the cycle of familiar errors, endlessly recurring, which largely makes up the course of military history may lead one to think that the only hope of escape lies in more candid scrutiny of past experience and new honest in facing the facts. 

But one should still be able to appreciate the point of view of those who fear the consequences. Faith matters so much in times of crisis. One must have gone deep into history before reaching the conviction that truth matters more. 

We are blind to our own blindness: 

All of us do foolish things, but the wiser realize what they do. The most dangerous error is the failure to recognize our own tendency to error. That failure is a common affliction of authority. 

Understanding the restraints of democracy: 

We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the "conspiracy for mutual inefficiency". Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity and entails the exclusion of first-rate ability if it is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is less. 

Anyone who urges a different system, for efficiency's sake, is betraying the vital tradition. 

(Note: A lot of "intelligent" people voted for a narcissist Trump deluding themselves with imagined efficiency and unfortunately, it is still happening in India with no end in sight. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.) 

On Napolean & Hitler: 

To the unromantic historian, Napolean is more of a knave than a hero. But to the philosopher, he is even more of a fool than a knave. His folly was shown in the ambition he conceived and the goal he pursued, while this frustration was ensured by his capacity to fool himself. Yet the reflection remains that such a fool and his devasting folly was largely the creation of smaller, if better, fools. So great is the fascination of romantic folly!

Almost exactly 129 years after Napolean launched his invasion is Russia, Hitler began his attack on Russia, on June 22, 1941. Despite the revolutionary changes which had taken place in the interval he was to provide a tragic demonstration of the truth that mankind, and least of all its "great men," do not learn from history. 

The secret of lasting reforms: 

Reforms that last are those that come naturally, and with less friction, when men's minds have become ripe of them. A life spent in sowing a few grains of fruitful thought is a life spent more effectively than in hasty action that produces a crop of weeds. That leads us to see the difference, truly a vital difference, between influence and power. 

On the myth of "great man" (god delusion): 

History shows that the main hindrance to real progress is the ever-popular myth of the 'great man'. While 'greatness' may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if even then referring more to particular qualities than to the embodied sum, the 'great man' is a clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded or to picture themselves, as great men. Many of those who gain power under power present systems have much that is good in them. Few are without some good in them. But to keep the lowest common denominator of the people, to instinct rather than to reason, to interest rather than to right, to expediency rather than to principle. It sounds practical and may thus command respect where to speak of ideals might only arouse distrust. But in practice, there is nothing more difficult than to discover where expediency lies, it is apt to lead from one expedient to another, in a vicious circle through endless knots. 

The ultimate dream (and mine too): 

How differently the affairs of the world would go, with a little more decency, a little more honesty, a little more thought! Thought-attempting, above all, to see a few moves ahead and realize the dangers of condoning evil. We try to play the old diplomatic game, yet cannot hope to play it successfully, because we have acquired scruples from which the old-style exponent of realpolitik is free, not yet having grown up as far. 

(Note: "decent" men who never use foul language in public nor private, mindlessly voted for the dangerous man Trump who used the word "pussy" in public gatherings. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

The germs of war: 

Sympathies and antipathies, interests and loyalties, cloud the vision. And this kind of short-sight is apt to produce short temper. 

As a light on the processes by which wars are manufactured and detonated, there is nothing more illuminating than a study of the fifty years of history preceding 1914. The vital influences are to detected not in the formal documents compiled by rulers, ministers, and generals but in their marginal notes and verbal asides. Here are revealed their instinctive prejudices, lack of interest in truth for its own sake, and indifference to the exactness of the statement and reception which is a safeguard against dangerous misunderstanding. 

I have come to think that accuracy, in the deepest sense is the basic virtue, the foundation of understanding, supporting the promise of progress. 

Sweeping judgments, malicious gossip, inaccurate statements which spread a misleading impression; these are symptoms of the moral and mental recklessness that gives rise to war. Studying their effect, one is lead to see that the germs of war lie within ourselves, not in economics, politics, or religion as such. How can we hope to rid the world of war until we have cured ourselves of the originating causes?

(Note: once again, men of "character" without a hint of irony nor awareness of their dissonance voted for a narcissist Trump. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

How the germs work: 

While economic factors formed a predisposing cause, the deeper and more decisive factors lay in human nature, its possessiveness, competitiveness vanity, and pugnacity, all of which were fomented by the dishonestly which breeds inaccuracy. 

Both of those governments, and their foreign ministers, in particular, were all ready to bring misery upon millions rather than swallow their injured pride. 

Plan for peace: 

Any plan for peace is apt to be not only futile but dangerous. Like most planning, unless of a mainly material kind, it breaks down through disregard of human nature. Worse still, the higher the hopes that are built on such a plan, the more likely that their collapse may precipitate war. 

There is no panacea for peace that can be written out in a formula like a doctor's prescription. But one can set down a series of practical points; elementary principles drawn from the sum of human experience in all times. Study war and learn from its history. Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil; nothing is so self-blinding. Cure yourself of two commonly fatal delusions: the idea of victory and the idea that war cannot be limited. 

How did our civilization has survived so far?: 

An important influence was the growth of more formal and courteous manners in social life. This code of manners spread into the field of international relations. These two factors, reason and manners, saved civilization when it was on the verge of collapse. Men came to feel that behavior mattered more than belief, and customs more than creeds, in making earthly life tolerable and human relations workable. 

(Note: Belief in an imaginary economy mattered for 70 plus million US citizens than behavior and customs and ended up voting for a narcissist Trump).

War is a means to an end (Difference between Napolean and Wellington): 

It was because he really understood war that he became so good at securing peace. He was the least militaristic of soldiers and free from the lust of glory. It was because he saw the value of peace that he became so unbeatable in war. For he kept the end in view, instead of falling in love with the means. Unlike Napolean, he was not infected by the romance of war, which generates illusions and self-deception. That was how Napolean had failed and Wellington prevailed. 

If you wish for peace, understand war. If there is one lesson that should be clear from history it is that bad means deform the end, or deflect its course thither. I would suggest the corollary that, if we take care of the means, the end will take care of itself. 

History and Christianity (how to limit and eliminate idealogy): 

The oldest gospel manuscripts belong to the fourth century A.D. They are copies of copies so that there was an immensely long interval during which copyists might alter the original text to fit the religious ideas of their own generation. Biblical scholars have to base themselves on nothing more definite than a tradition in ascribing the origin of the earliest written gospels to the second half of the first century A.D. If they are correct in their deduction, which is really speculation, there is still no means of telling how much they were altered by editing in the course of three hundred years; a period that abounded in controversy and schisms in the Chruch. 

We are given minds to use, and there can be no better use for them than religious thinking. But we should humbly recognize there may be different paths and feel in sympathy with all other travelers. The difficulties that arise in religious doctrine and history too often drive thoughtful people into a state of no belief. But for my own part, I have found that the difficulties tend to disappear if one remembers that such doctrine and history was complied by human interpreters, humanly liable to mistakes. 

On Confucianism (and Buddism): 

Confucianism was humanly wiser. It recognized, and applied, better than Christianity the truth of experience that was epitomized in Aristotle's observation that "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way."  At the same time, the Chinese themselves seem to have found that Confucianism "was not enough." Hence the appeal of Buddhism and Taoism there, often in combination with Confucianism. They provided a more spiritual element that mankind wanted. 

Towards the middle of the book, Liddell Hart wrote these beautiful lines to given a simple heuristic on what might work. It felt as though he was talking about how Max and I lived for 13 years (I continue to do so with him inside me). It made me smile and think at least we were and are on the right path... 

The race of power and personal positions seems to destroy all men's characters. I believe that the only creature who can keep his honour is a man living on his own estate; he has no need to intrigue and struggle, for it is no good intriguing for fine weather. 

This is an amazing book and should be treasured for life. Please read and re-read it for the rest of your life. 

Our deeper hope from experience is that it should make us, not shrewder (for next time), but wiser (forever). History teaches us personal philosophy. 

- Jacob Burckhardt

Once we get a meta-level understanding of history, we should turn to the present and salute the people who make this civilization tick. One of them is Alexey Navalny. Let's cheer and support his audacity. 

Same Bullshit, Packaged Differently - From Ayn Rand To Rene Girard And Silicon Valley's Cognitive Dissonance

A couple of years ago I bought Rene Girard's now-famous book (thanks to Peter Thiel's dissonance) Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (please don't buy this crap). 

I couldn't even get through the first few pages... at least Rand's books are good reads. My head started aching and spinning... these are books that are better off used for recycling. That reminds me I have a handful of books that fall under that category of "not donate but recycle the paper". 

But yet, the morons in Silicon Valley read and follow his preachings religiously! 

It's none of our business what they read but unfortunately, these morons control so much of our lives and naturally it becomes our business what values and belief's these morons follow. Adrian Daub's has a great synopsis of this cognitive dissonance: 

Tech leaders have long been infatuated with thinkers who reverse the commonsense picture of how power in our society is distributed and how it operates. And we have largely gone along for the ride. Examples of self-styled victimhood are dime-a-dozen in Silicon Valley. 

The optic of a multibillion-dollar corporation spending millions of dollars arguing it’s been treated unfairly by being forced to play by the same rules as other companies already reveals the enormous distortion of scale involved in arguments of this type. The idea that your company is being victimized by nefarious professors and union organizers goes further, however: The kind of thinking that allows this to happen first involves a wholesale reconceptualization of power.

Thiel and Uber have to convince themselves that, if looked at the right way, power in society doesn’t flow as common sense would suggest it does. In this way of thinking, people who — to ordinary understanding — seem as though they have little or no actual power secretly have loads of it; the person who has somehow made billions and has a speaking slot at the ruling party’s national convention in truth has none of it. Tech loves its philosophical references and its profound-seeming ideas. So when it comes to this curious, but deeply useful, distortion of scale and power relations, tech unsurprisingly has expended extensive intellectual resources to convince itself of its victimhood.

Who made the powerless so powerful? While tech magnates almost never invoke him directly, the idea that in society the strong are the real victims goes back to 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his On the Genealogy of Morality. Christianity, Nietzsche argued, had managed the trick of telling the strong and powerful to aspire to the meekness and powerlessness of the people they had power over — to adopt, as he put it, a “slave morality.” Once Christianity had pulled this off, the weak and powerless were the true oppressors. The powerful were forced to understand their strength as sinful. Suddenly unsure of themselves and terrified of damnation, they had become the victims of a world-historic con.

Nietzsche proposed that exercising power wasn’t bad and that a moral system that said it was, well, that was unnatural and unhealthy. He wasn’t interested in economics; it was a question of morality for him. Ayn Rand applied this idea to places where it mattered to tech: to board rooms, to industries, to entire societies. Rand’s fiction works portray a world in which the strong are being hemmed in by “second-handers” who weaponize their own weakness, their own dependence on others, while the “makers” are forced to submit to regulation in penance for their own autonomy.

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Let’s say you like this idea of the powerful being the true victims, but you’d prefer it to be even more counterintuitive. The thought of René Girard might be for you. A philosopher who taught in Stanford’s French department for decades, he’s not as widely read as Rand. But Thiel was one of his students, and Thiel has made spreading Girard’s gospel one of his missions. Girard is most famous for his theory of the scapegoat: All desire, Girard taught, is mimetic — meaning we desire things because others desire the same things. Culture displaces the inevitable conflict that arises as a result by redirecting reciprocal violence toward one single, shared target. In this way, the tension that exists within any social group is refocused onto a single individual.

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In a way, it’s not surprising that an industry used to getting its way would locate philosophies that buttress its attempts to evade regulation and generate positive PR. But two things stand out about tech’s adoption of this philosophical preoccupation with the victimization of the powerful. First, there’s the fact that we listen to tech leaders as thinkers in ways that are fairly unprecedented. My yoga instructor recently chose to “close out our practice” with some sage words from Steve Jobs — it’s hard to imagine Lee Iacocca being invoked in that way after a vinyasa flow. We live in a culture that defers to these ideas with exceptional credulity. That’s what makes this preoccupation so troubling: If rich people want to adjust their categories to deal with their inevitable cognitive dissonance, then that’s one thing. But what if they adjust ours in the bargain?

In other words, to summarize the cognitive dissonance: A troubling number of silicon valley folks truly believe themselves as our saviours! Thanks to a deadly combination of Rene Girard's bullshit and unfulfilled childhood fanaties inherited from Marvel comics. 

Breakthrough Starshot, CIA's UFO Papers & The "Lonely" Sapiens

 Look up into the sky some clear, starlit night and allow yourself the freedom to wonder.

- In Search of Ancient Astronauts with Rod Serling

Stephan Hawking, Yuri Milner & Marc Zuckerberg founded the Breakthrough Starshot project in 2015 looking for answers to questions such as: 

Where is everybody?

So wondered the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The Universe is ancient and immense. Life, he reasoned, has had plenty of time to get started – and get smart. But we see no evidence of anything alive or intelligent in space. In the last five years, we have discovered that planets in the habitable zone of stars are common. Based on the numbers discovered so far, there are estimated to be billions more in our galaxy alone. Yet we are still in the dark about life. Are we really alone? Or are there others out there

Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million program of astronomical observations and analysis, the most comprehensive ever undertaken in search of evidence of technological civilizations in the Universe. The partners with some of the world’s largest and most advanced telescopes, across five continents, to survey targets including one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical frequency bands.

Where can life flourish?

In August 2016, a potentially habitable Earth-like planet was discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri – the Sun’s nearest neighbor. Based on the most recent astronomical data, it is likely that there are other such planets in our cosmic neighborhood. With technology now or soon available, it will be possible not only to find them, but to analyze whether they have atmospheres – and whether those atmospheres contain oxygen and other potential signatures of primitive life.

Breakthrough Watch is multi-million dollar Breakthrough Watch is an Earth- and space-based astronomical program aiming to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth, in search of oxygen and other potential signatures of primitive life. The program is run by an international team of experts in exoplanet detection and imaging.

Can we reach the stars?

Life in the Universe does not only mean extraterrestrials. It also means us. No other beings have yet visited us – but neither have we stepped out to the galactic stage. Are we destined to belong to Earth for as long as we survive? Or can we reach the stars?

If we can, the natural first step is our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri – four light years away.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for a new technology, enabling ultra-light uncrewed space flight at 20% of the speed of light; and to lay the foundations for a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation.

Thanks to COVID-19 (yes, really!), the CIA declassified 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents starting from 1976. How convenient! it seems like the "world" didn't exist prior to 1976 for them. 

I don't believe they released everything. Although I haven't started reading/analyzing the documents, I believe it is probably full of fluff that would raise more questions than giving us any answers. You can download the non-user-unfriendly documents via the Black Vault website. 

I love this little blue planet. I love Max. I love Fluffy, Garph, and Neo. In my little world and in my little time, I was able to interact with only 2 other species. I learned and still learning so much from them every day. Given my shelve life, I will die without learning anything from most species on this planet. That will be my greatest regret. 

If given a chance, I would love to learn from other beings outside of earth. I am all for the search for other life forms. My only disagreement is packing Sapiens and shipping them to inhabit other planets and stars without understanding and then mending human nature. As a counter-argument to my own disagreement, what if the tools for understanding and mending human nature lies outside of earth? 

In the meantime, we should spend an equal amount of time and money in understanding non-human animals on this planet. It goes without saying that eliminating the sufferings we cause our non-human friends doesn't cost anything. So let's do that first and we will never feel lonely. 

 

Honeybees Coat Hive Entrance In Animal Dung To Repel Predators

As a kid, while visiting my grandmother's town, I have seen many poor people (in Tamilnadu) coat the floor of their small house using cow dung. Once the cow dung is dried out, it formed a thin-solid layer, and surprisingly, the house would smell fresh. 

For 46 years, I didn't know the answer to that question except for a good hypothesis that cow dung is rich in 'good' microbiome and in turn, helps keep harmful viruses and bacteria at bay (you can read about it here and video here). 

It looks like that hypothesis is true and even honeybee's use the same trick: 

This “fecal spotting” not only repels giant hornets—it’s the first clear example of tool use in honeybees, says Heather Mattila, an entomologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and co-author of the study, published December 9 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Before this study, researchers had not investigated what caused the black marks often seen covering beehive entrances in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Mattila and colleagues verified that the dark material is actually feces of various animals, such as chickens and cows. The researchers also documented that the feces repel a species known as Vespa soror, commonly called giant hornets.

To finally figure out what the bees had been doing “was pretty stunning,” says Mattila, whose research was partially funded by the National Geographic Society. It’s “one of the coolest things our [research] group has ever explored.”

The study takes on even more significance because Vespa soror is the closest relative to Vespa mandarinia, also known as Asian giant hornets, or “murder hornets,” whose recent discovery in the Pacific Northwest has fueled worldwide intrigue.

Understanding how the Vietnamese bee behavior repels hornet attacks could have applications for protecting honeybees in other countries, including the United States, Mattila says.

And I have seen people step on elephant poop for the same reason. Ancients had good wisdom passed on for generations. Science slowly proves it right but you don't have to wait until science proves it. 

Biodiversity and protecting all our fellow creatures is the only important task we have. Economy and money are man-made bullshit will never stand the test of time. 

Anesthesia Works on Plants Too, and We Don’t Know Why

This not only falls under the bucket of "so much we don't know" but once again shows us the richness and diversity of plant lives.  

Plants and animals are separated by 1.5 billion years of evolution, but still have many similarities. Cell structures are broadly the same, though plants add chloroplasts and cell walls to the mix. Animals evolved muscles and discrete internal organs for processing nutrients from the environment, while plant cells are more homogenous. A plant cell from one part of the organism is more similar to one from another part than two randomly selected animal cells. Other than these details and new tissue types, cells haven’t changed much in the last 1.5 billion years. That’s what, in theory, makes plants good candidates for this research. Though they may be similar in cell structure, plants are still they’re missing the major element that anesthesia shuts down in animals, neurons.

Neurons are the essential element of the nervous system and found only in animals, not plants. They transfer information about sensation and motion from peripheral parts of the body to the brain and back. By sending electro-chemical signals in the form of atomic ions, neurons can communicate great distances through the body. In someone as tall as Shaquille O’Neal, those signals travel over 8 feet, from the top of his brain to the tips of his toes. Most of this information is passed as sodium ions — atom-sized charged particles that pass through channels to zap from one neuron to the other. Lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used by dentists, blocks these sodium channels, stopping neurons from sending information to each other. That’s why they make your mouth numb, the neurons there can’t send pain sensations to your brain. They’re stopped.

Plants don’t have neurons, but lidocaine still deadens their movements and sensations.

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Ether and lidocaine are remarkably different chemicals, with vastly different structures, but they both work as anesthetics in plants and animals. In animals, we have some guesses about how ether works. Some results have pointed to it messing with cell membranes and somehow stopping them from communicating without completely breaking them. These membranes are layers of fat molecules that wrap every cell in our bodies, protecting them from the outside environment. It seems like ether perturbs the membranes and stops cells from communicating. Probably. But we’re not sure. Plant membranes are incredibly different though, and ether still works. It shouldn’t, but it does.

- More here 

Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise

of gentleness, or elegant

because I honor the grace

that keeps this world. I am

a man crude as any,

gross of speech, intolerant,

stubborn, angry, full

of fits and furies. That I

may have spoken well

at times, is not natural.

A wonder is what it is.

- Wendell Berry

If you are wondering how a "Sapien Skeptic" that I am listening to an interview that has "hope" and "humanity" together in the title...  then make no mistake. 

Wendel Berry answers that question (@ ~14 mins): 

Question: I am wondering if putting faith in the people is a wise investment...?

Wendel Berry: I am not putting the faith in the people and putting my faith in some of the people. The ones who are committed. 

Another obvious insight Sapiens refuse to face: 

The aim of the industrial revolution from year one has been to replace people with technology. So it's a little contemptible to hear these people express in surprise at this late date that we have an employment problem. I don't know if there any politicians of visibility who could say that. 

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world.

We have been wrong. 

We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary

the assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. 

And that requires that we make the

effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

- Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Nancy Andreasen's Insights on Creativity and Mental Disorder

Maria Popova of Brain Picking has another gem; this time illustrating life long work of Nancy Andreasen to discover the causes behind creativity which includes mental disorders such as Bipolar, Asperger's syndrome, depression, etc.

I have written many times over the years on depression and how it has helped me; especially in the past year after Max passed away. 

One of the benefits for evolution to "preserve" depression in us is to focus and reflect on "things" sans distraction to reach a solution. Perpetual busyness never helps to focus and reflect; hence people tend to outsource their questions and problems to cable news morons to positivity gurus. 

Here are some brilliant insights from Nancy Andreasen's book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius: 

Although many writers had had periods of significant depression, mania, or hypomania, they were consistently appealing, entertaining, and interesting people. They had led interesting lives, and they enjoyed telling me about them as much as I enjoyed hearing about them. Mood disorders tend to be episodic, characterized by relatively brief periods of low or high mood lasting weeks to months, interspersed with long periods of normal mood (known as euthymia to us psychiatrists). All the writers were euthymic at the time that I interviewed them, and so they could look back on their periods of depression or mania with considerable detachment. They were also able to describe how abnormalities in mood state affected their creativity. Consistently, they indicated that they were unable to be creative when either depressed or manic.

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One point of view … is that gifted people are in fact supernormal or superior in many ways. My writers certainly were. They were charming, fun, articulate, and disciplined. They typically followed very similar schedules, getting up in the morning and allocating a large chunk of time to writing during the earlier part of the day. They would rarely let a day go by without writing. In general, they had a close relationship with friends and family. They manifested the Freudian definition of health: lieben und arbeiten, “to love and to work.” On the other hand, they also manifested the alternative common point of view about the nature of genius: that it is “to madness near allied.” Many definitely had experienced periods of significant mood disorder. Importantly, though handicapping creativity when they occurred, these periods of mood disorder were not permanent or long-lived. In some instances, they may even have provided powerful material upon which the writer could later draw, as a Wordsworthian “emotion recollected in tranquility".

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Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.

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All human beings (and their brains) have to cope with the fact that their five senses gather more information than even the magnificent human brain is able to process. To put this another way: we need to be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around us — the smell of pizza baking, the sound of the cat meowing, or the sight of birds flying outside the window — if we are going to focus our attention and concentrate on what we are doing (in your case, for example, reading this book). Our ability to filter out unnecessary stimuli and focus our attention is mediated by brain mechanisms in regions known as the thalamus and the reticular activating system.