Month: April 2020

A Study in Humility?

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We use myths, legends, fables, folktales, fairy tales, and parables as ways to understand momentous and frightening events. Parables speak of ordinary mortals performing sometimes extraordinary actions. In trying to find meaning in the covid-19 pandemic, I searched for an appropriate parable. The closest that springs to mind is the biblical story of David and Goliath. But in this case, the evil character is the small one. So if the moral roles are reversed with covid-19, perhaps the teaching this time is more about humility.

A virus is about 120 nanometers in size, where a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. If you do the math, it means over 200,000 viruses could crowd into one inch of space.  What this suggests is that this pathogen is a very tiny entity. And yet, covid-19, a coronavirus, has brought humankind to its knees. Democracies, dictatorships, and everything in between yielded to the power of this microorganism.

Viruses attach to droplets of saliva when a human coughs or sneezes. Scientists estimate that about 3,000 such beads form a single cough and ten times as many in a sneeze. And the speed at which they race out of the mouth approaches between 50-200 miles per hour. When someone is sick, the droplets in a single cough may contain two hundred million individual virus particles. This number will vary dramatically as the immune system clears out the pathogen. 

Covid-19 is infectious and causes respiratory tract problems ranging from mild to lethal. For those already suffering from a respiratory illness, such as asthma, or a compromised immune system, it puts them in a vulnerable category. To date, over 3 million humans throughout the earth experienced coronavirus and close to a quarter million people succumbed to it.

Regardless of how much our ego distorts the accurate image of our character, covid-19 shows us how vulnerable we are to the tiniest of organisms. Despite every society implementing the only tool at their disposal for fighting this invisible enemy, social distancing, it has been an upsetting experience. Social or physical distancing is something contrary to our social nature, yet we followed the recommendations and are seeing the end of the storm. At least for now. But the virus has made crystal clear that although humbling, the one thing we can count on as a species is our inimitable spirit!

Walking Is a Miracle

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It was a warm sunny spring day. The type that justifies living in California. I was meandering and enjoying a hiking trail around our housing complex when I lost my footing and fell. The injury was sufficient so I cannot partake in this exercise, at least for a while. The sudden pause gave me a chance to reconsider an activity I enjoy while sheltering in place during the covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, it made me appreciate walking more than ever.

Our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus, began ambulating upright over two million years ago. But it is only in the last few decades that researchers have gained insights into how we do it. The action is a complex mechanical engineering accomplishment. Complicated and mysterious enough that some have characterized it as a daily miracle we should not take for granted.

The term walking originates in the Old English word wealcan meaning “to roll.” A 2013 article in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Lipfert and colleagues outlines the unique interaction between ankle, knee, muscles and tendons that summarizes how we go about this roll. Wikipedia describes walking from a physics perspective as the kinetic energy of forward motion being traded dynamically for a rise in potential energy. At another level of definition, the movement results from the body “vaulting” (or rolling) over the leg on the ground. One leg moves forward in a way that maximizes motion while using minimal amounts of energy. This raises the center of mass to its highest point as the leg passes the vertical and dropping it to the lowest as the limbs spread apart.

The 2D inverted pendulum model of walking provides an even more explicit description. During forward motion, the leg that leaves the ground swings forward from the hip. This sweep is the first pendulum. Then the leg strikes the ground with the heel and rolls through to the toe in a motion described as an inverted pendulum. The motion of the two legs synchronize so that one foot is always in contact with the ground.

There are two stages necessary for starting this wealcan, the powerful “push-off” phase. The first stage is an “alleviation” in which the action relieves the trailing leg of the burden of supporting the body mass. Then in a “launching” stage, the knee buckles, allowing the rapid release of stored elastic energy in the ankle tendons, like the triggering of a catapult. The catapult energy from the ankle is used to swing the leg, not add sizeable amounts of energy to the forward motion. This makes it energy-efficient and agile, making the human action different from how robots walk. As the hip rotates 40 degrees in the sagittal plane during a normal stride it becomes a smooth, beautiful movement.

Is walking a simple act?  No. It is a complicated mechanical engineering organization of movements and forces that only recently has shed its mysteries. It is a daily miracle. We perform it so easily and overlook it from among the other physiological miracles, like seeing and hearing. The covid-19 pandemic has been a brutal war on humanity but also an opportunity to pause and recognize the many things we take for granted.

Humanity’s Secret Weapon

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Covid-19 is an infectious coronavirus attacking humanity in a world-wide pandemic. Charles Eisenstein, author, essayist, and public speaker, asked a rather interesting question related to this pandemic in his March 2020 article, The Coronation. It is one deserving of consideration: “Why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity?”  His argument is that other threats paralyze us, but somehow, we got jolted into action by covid-19. And the reason, according to Eisenstein, is we don’t know how to deal with other overwhelming threats. In contrast, we seem to know how to “control” the covid-19 situation. Control involves physical actions, such as social distancing, which are easier to do compared to mental actions necessary in other cases. The argument is interesting but incomplete.

For one, other threats affect specific groups (children, depressed individuals, addicts). Covid-19 is indiscriminate and affects every single person on the planet. Early on, we convinced ourselves that the virus affected mainly the elderly and a few vulnerable populations. While these populations have borne a disproportionate amount of the pain, the stats say everyone is susceptible to infection and can suffer similar consequences. The only comparable threat to covid-19 is climate change, although such a threat isn’t imminent and still too far away to matter. Covid-19 is immediate and in our face. As others have argued, it is the dress rehearsal for the bigger show to come when climate change will affect us all.

The missing ingredient in Eisenstein’s perspective is the recognition that covid-19 affects the core of what makes us human. Homo sapiens evolved as a communal group, favoring close social contact. It is why we have been so successful and literally reigning supreme. However, our strength is also our weakness. Being social makes us susceptible to diseases transmitted from individual to individual. Covid-19 is taking advantage of our evolutionary strength, the social bonding and cohesion of our species. The ruthless assault by this invisible enemy has taken many fellow citizens in agonizing deaths due to respiratory failure. While the attack is ongoing, it has also unmasked what could be humanity’s ultimate secret weapon and the basis for surviving this war: the adaptability of our social cohesion.

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his book Principles of Biology in 1864. Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. He conceptualized the evolutionary process as comprising of two movements – integration and differentiation. For Spencer, the principle of integration provided the unifying dynamic keeping a differentiated population together. When integration weakens, it leads to dissolution or disappearance of the differentiated traits and of the species. Integration describes processes which become the driving force to unite, combine, and integrate parts into a whole. When there is high interactivity among the parts, it produces connected and interdependent organisms with features of social cohesion.  Social cohesion refers to the glue that makes a group a group. The glue of social cohesion emphasizes the connectedness or bonds arising to make individuals in the group meaningfully related to one another. It also enhances the identification with the group, incentives and willingness to cooperate, social and economic balance, and what modulates the interactions among members. In bee, ant, and primate societies, social cohesion is the ultimate expression of the integration drive. And this is what covid-19 is leveraging to attack us—the essence of what makes us social creatures. It is also why our response is so unique.

In humans, social cohesion reaches its zenith when integration of the whole benefits the individual parts. By this I mean when the infrastructure of the society, the institutions of government and politics, provide the guidance and incentive to practice social distancing, for example. In this way, they encourage individuals to go against the grain of evolution to survive. This is the part of the story covid-19 has exposed. It has shown that this most treasured feature of humanity, its social cohesiveness, is adaptable and can be relaxed to bend to the attack we are under. Bend but not break. And in that flexibility to allow for the infectious agent to exhaust itself. What the pandemic has shown is that humanity can respond and adapt as the communal organism it is. It has been fascinating to watch and it portends a new and exciting evolutionary step in the story of humans.

An Enhanced Sensory Experience

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The world of my senses did not vanish, nor choirs of angels appear following what I characterize as my realization. There were, nonetheless, interesting new experiences. One was seeing things for what seemed like the first time. My childhood sense of curiosity re-appeared. It gave me an appreciation of the wonder of the world in the smallest things. The dew on the grass in the morning and how it reflected light. It drew me to the intricate details of the leaves and colors of flowers and the light on objects. I awakened from a black and white dream into a world of technicolor. An enhanced attentiveness and focused curiosity accompanied this hypersensitivity. But it was not a negative, schizophrenic-like experience, in which my brain could not filter out irrelevant things and thus felt overwhelmed. Instead, there was a calmness and a joy to it, a genuine delight in the experience.

I remember going outside one afternoon and looking up at the white wispy clouds in the sky. They appeared arranged by a master artist as buds around a bright sun.  I saw the red, pink, and yellow streaks of light from that sun as streaks of color from this artist’s palette painting the sky in translucent pastels. I then looked down and saw the reddish-brown leaves from the western sycamore outside our home and saw the carpet of leaves on the sidewalk. Looking at one leaf, the intricacy of the veins struck me as a well-planned highway transporting chlorophyll, the miracle protein that converts sunlight into oxygen. What struck me with even more force was the sense that all this was for my benefit.  More interesting than this hypersensitivity to sensory experiences was a natural increase in social behavior that connected me more with life. Having been an introvert most of my life, I found a remarkable unfoldment in empathy and concern for the feelings of others. These changes in perspective and my increased awareness of them is, I am certain, the difference between truly living and being lost in the fog of self-centeredness.

Beyond Metaphors

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In my attempt to understand the mind beyond metaphors, I began exploring other alternatives in addition to science. One path led me into meditation and the spiritual realm. At some point in the 20 years of this exploration, the boundary between science and spirituality gave way. What became obvious at that point was that the thing I was searching for and trying to understand (mind, consciousness, God, Buddha-nature, enlightenment) was in fact the world I inhabited. I recognized my true nature in the life around me. And this new world stared at me as it had always been staring me in the face. This realization, as anyone who experiences it will tell you, is both funny (Is this a joke?) and infinitely “enlightening.”  Funny because it seems so obvious in retrospect. Infinitely enlightening because it is but the beginning of our real journey of discovery.

The most immediate change I experienced was a lessening in my need to achieve in terms of my career and professional goals. The self-evident purpose of my life wasn’t to achieve anything per se but to enjoy my beingness. Having studied to be a scientist, I had convinced myself that achievement drove my work. Accolades, grants, publications, and other aspects of research appeared to define the importance of who and what I was. Now, that discernment was reversed. I saw scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge and as having its own unique beauty without the need to make anything out of it. Everything else became secondary.

Along with this experience, I sensed a developing confidence.  I knew this realization was not a temporary state or another creation of the mind that would be soon forgotten. It was a real awakening to and appreciation of life. I developed a sensitivity to the “sacredness” of all things.   Sacredness in the sense of appreciating the beauty and uniqueness of everything, while appreciating their role in the larger unity of which I was part. Since that recognition, quiet moments and meditation have become my engagement and appreciation of this new sensibility. These changes in perspective and awareness do not mean I am no longer interested in doing my job, attend baseball games, make friends, or make love. Rather, it’s the motivation for doing these things that’s changed. The doing to achieve a goal is no longer important, just the doing is enough. Thus, an intrinsic joy in being human and doing normal things came to the forefront and was very satisfying. The experience reflected a natural flow, without the anxiety I had felt previously.

I also sense a paradox in all of this. The desire to know the unknown motivated my paths in both science and spirituality. But the closer I got to understanding the true nature of being, the self-centered motivation to know and to do faded and disappeared. Replaced instead by an intense desire to let whatever exists unfold without interference. Further, I learned to be content without having to do anything to garner such contentment. Since childhood, I have had an inner drive giving me the energy to excel and outdo others. It has motivated my desire to learn and explore science, but also facilitated my dissatisfaction, anxieties, discontent and fears. In my old skin, I felt guilty at not being productive. Following my realization, that driving energy still exists, but the sense of movement or needing to move and to do does not. I am calm, yet still motivated to learn and explore, but do not experience the anxieties and fears that accompanied my earlier life. I am not guilty resting. Instead, I am energized by rest and relaxation, by not-doing. As I write this I recognize how “normal” this all sounds, which is the whole point. Recognizing who we truly are, both the small swirl in the stream of consciousness and the stream itself, is as normal as normal gets.

Metaphors and Not Knowing

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To not know is an experience that feels like an impenetrable wall of silence. We rebel against it and invent tools, such as metaphors, to penetrate that silence. But, as useful as metaphors are, they are limiting. For one, they create boundaries where no such boundaries exist. Lakoff and Johnson, in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By argued that the metaphors we use for a thing dramatically constrain our freedom to think about it. If we touch the elephant’s snout, in the story about the blind men and the elephant, and think it is a snake, that concept will forever affect how we relate to it. Or to put it more scientifically, analogical thinking constrains hypothesis-making. Hence, the mind-metaphor of a container means we will tend to think of things either inside or outside the container mind. But that is an artificial distinction.

A more interesting relationship between mind and metaphor is the idea that mind, specifically thinking, or the intellect, or conceptualization, is the process of attempting to capture and understand the unknown. Metaphors are the essence of how we think and is so pervasive we aren’t really aware of doing it. As some psychologists have argued, “Figurative speech reflects how we actually experience much of our lives.” Mind is the meaning-making or metaphor-making process we engage in.

But even more interesting in the relationship between mind and metaphors is the question about the necessity for metaphorical thought.  Is there a different way of understanding an ineffable experience or an unobservable condition than by comparing it to something known? Does a metaphor truly increase our understanding or is it simply a way to increase our sociality, the ability to communicate with others?

My experience suggests that its more the latter than the former. Mind, on its own, is quite capable of experiencing the silence of the world, of not knowing, of actually knowing the unknowable, its beauty and terrifying aspects without language and intellectualization. But because we are social beings, we need to express these experiences in a transmittable and understandable way. Metaphors are necessary tools not for living but for sociality.

Making the Unknown Known

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Metaphors make the unknown knowable. They do so by taking an ineffable experience or an unobservable condition and comparing it to something known. Metaphors are bridges between the silence of the inexpressible and the language of the intellect. At least that is the argument made by David Thoreau, the 19th century American essayist, poet, and philosopher, and William Bronk, the 20th century American poet. From their perspective, silence is “the world of potentialities and meanings beyond the actual and expressed.” What makes these potentialities actual and expressed is metaphorical language. The power of this is reflected in the bible verse John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

A metaphor such as “the pandemic of 2020 is a world war” doesn’t capture the entire essence of what it is trying to describe, but it captures an important aspect of it: a world-wide catastrophe causing death and panic. Finding the right, distinguishing label is satisfying. And perhaps why we have a fuller sense of knowing when we label what is unknown. Whether this truly increases our understanding or just the ability to communicate with others, is really not relevant at this point.

From a psychological and neuroscience perspective mind is an unknown. By mind I mean that which arises when sensory, motor, mnemonic, and cognitive inputs and their associated feedback meld into a unified stream. Metaphors are useful tools to understand that. Mind-metaphors reflect dominant scientific ideas that change as we learn more about this unknown and as our tools and sophistication to describe it improve.

As a consequence of this history, one encounters innumerable variations of what were once useful metaphors that have now lost some of their explanatory power. One of the oldest is the mind-as-container metaphor. The mind as a physical entity that contains other entities in space has been a persistent idea. Plato talked about the mind as an aviary. We think of it as containing thoughts.

A variation of this is the mind-as-landscape (William Bronk’s mind landscape, where journeying is de rigueur); mind-as-stream (William James’s stream of consciousness); mind-as-entity (the mind as tangible, localized, and discrete). Another subtler variation of the container idea is mind-as-body. Here mind is what the body is and even more specifically what the brain is. The mind-as-embodiment is a monistic interpretation that is contrary to mind-as-essence. Mind-as-essence is the dualistic interpretation in which mind is an essence separable from the physical reality of the body.

In contemporary thought, mind metaphors are still grounded in old definitions but increasingly seen as multidimensional, dynamic processes. Mind-as-living-being reflects a mind where thoughts and experiences form a ‘sentient web.’ Mind-as-development or as-blank-slate; mind-as-movie projector; mind-as-connectionist network; mind-as-brain (connectionism); mind-as-computer (symbolisms); mind-as-dynamic system (nonrepresentational, low-dimensional).

All these and the inexhaustible supply of mind-metaphors remind me of the classic parable of the blind men describing an animal they have never encountered before (an elephant) just by touching only one part of it. As long as each experiences only a small portion of the elephant, of mind, of whatever the unknown is, the description is likely wrong. As our experience expands, descriptions change and become more complicated. But metaphors can only approach truth, they are incapable of expressing the entire truth. 

Waiting for Godot

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It’s what I imagine the playwright Samuel Beckett’s characters felt. Or, better yet, what God feels, while waiting patiently for someone to arrive. Waiting for anyone to hear the message, as He makes the birds sing, flowers blossom, the rain fall, the neighbor smile and say hello, and in infinite ways reaches out. The response: muted, silent.

A few weeks ago, I started this blog. Finding content was not the problem. I tackled the coronavirus, our anxious monkey mind, and our predictive brain. I even tried poetry. The response: crickets. My heavenly answer to this: Be patient. My Trumpian reply: Ingrates!

I’ve learned that the biggest hurdle preventing my voice from being heard over the roar of the Internet is leading the crowd to the blog site. They call it getting eyeballs! I still don’t know how that happens. At the moment, getting eyeballs seems gruesome and magical.  Although, I am learning about tags and categories and posting on social media, etc.  In the meantime, I sit and wait for Godot.

Our Predictive Brain

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An often-overlooked human skill is our capacity to forecast future outcomes. We are excellent at anticipating an event in a variety of ways. Look-ahead functions or anticipatory mechanisms occur in how we read sentences and interpret speech. They also exist in how we carry out movements, like walking, grasping an object, or riding a bicycle. With reading or listening to a conversation, for example, we anticipate the words that come next. This facilitates the dynamics of a dialogue. Neuroscience studies show that the cerebellum executes some of these predictive operations for both motor and speech actions. This implies that how we control muscles to execute a movement is similar to how we manipulate sounds to construct a sentence.

An important aspect of our predictive brain is its ability to correct errors. Error correction is necessary to optimize and smooth out behavior by minimizing the adverse effects of deviations or unexpected perturbations in the system. It’s part of the flexibility, adaptability, and neuroplasticity that makes our brain unique. However, because we can expand the time window of processing, from the immediate present to extended past and future, it can complicate predictions. The predictive accuracy is inversely related to the timing of the event. During the very brief intervals required for movement or language, we do nicely. Otherwise, we are not very good. Yet we are predisposed to try. The result is stress, fear, depression and the myriad other disorders that arise when our predictions fail.

The solution to these prediction failures is easy to understand but hard to implement. It is to focus on what our brains evolved to do well. That is, to handle present-moment or immediate contingencies. Large portions of brain power are dedicated to this kind of creative, moment-by-moment living. The phone rings and I answer it; the water on the stove starts boiling over and I turn the gas off; I am watching television and getting angry at the story of the immigrant child who died while crossing the river with his dad. Most of this activity falls below our level of awareness. Error processing, on the other hand, triggers conscious processing and interruptions by our rational mind that require a look into the distant past or into the far future. This can cause problems if our ego decides to interfere. It is best, then, to let our predictive brain do the job of the moment and leave awareness to deal with the past and future. In other words, zip up that egoic intellect.

I will talk about the role of nonconscious and conscious processing in terms of  present, past, and future thinking, as well as egoic thinking, in upcoming posts. Keep tuned!

Out of the Many, One

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The statistical models used to estimate the number of coronavirus infections, and resulting deaths, assumed that only about half of the U.S. population would follow the physical distancing guidelines. Surprisingly the vast majority of Americans took heed. As a consequence, the predicted number of deaths is projected to be about one-tenth of what the models predicted. The question is why? Why did so many fellow citizens follow what is essentially the opposite tendency that drives human social behavior? Why were Americans who value their independence and freedom so compliant at following the guidelines? How were we able to give up our treasured sports, entertainment, shopping, churches, and other activities that represent the essence of who we are?

One obvious answer is that we faced a life and death situation unlike any we’ve encountered in the recent past. Nothing focuses the mind as much as our imminent demise. A disease that is highly contagious, deadly, essentially everywhere, and for which we have no cure is terrifying. Undoubtedly, the coronavirus pandemic scared the bejesus out of us. A less obvious answer is that we actually learned lessons from other countries. Perhaps not so much from China, where it all started, but from Italy, which is more similar to our culture and was devastated. It was frightening to watch the Italian health system be overwhelmed with covid-19 cases and the accumulating death count.

But the least obvious explanation is that for one brief moment we recognized our shared humanity. In a blink of an eye we realized our true nature, that we are all connected and that what you do affects me and vice versa. While most of the other factors focused our mind on the problem, it was the realization of our common humanity that produced the promising results. And although it is painful to lose so many, in the end we remain focused and committed as one. This singular moment in our history made the traditional motto of the United States come to life: E pluribus unum –”Out of many, one.”

It is my hope this learned experience remains fresh in our minds for a long time. If it does, it has the potential to radically change us for the better.