Archive for May, 2010
A series of photography rendering the infinite subtleties the clouds and atmosphere above.
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A series of photography depicting the quiet, still beauty of the scenes around us.
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A series of photography devoted to the beautiful glimpses into nature we can have when we stop to enjoy.
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In a last-ditch effort to save the life of teenager Dave Stahl in 1975, Dr. John Kersey of the University of Minnesota performed the first successful bone marrow transplant to treat Burkitt’s lymphoma, a fatal form of cancer. Bone marrow contains stem cells, cells that are capable of developing into any of number of related cell types. Kersey had learned from his mentor, Dr. Robert Good, that these cells might be used to attack cancer. Kersey’s pioneering operation was successful and initiated three decades of research into the medical potential of stem cells—as well as three decades of controversy.
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On March 9th, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order rescinding the limits set by the past administration’s federal funding ban for embryonic stem cell research, making clear that the current administration supports such research. Once relegated to the depths of esoteric health journals, stem cells have made their way to the nation’s front pages because of the ethical nuances surrounding the subject.
Why is so much controversy present? Because although stem cells can be harvested from a variety of sources, including adult cells, or what are known as induced-pluripotent cells, researchers still believe the stem cells most effective in fighting human diseases come from human embryos. A number of groups, many from religious backgrounds, have vocally opposed stem cell research because they believe harvesting cells from human embryos is ethically wrong. Other groups have argued just as vocally that the benefits to human life from stem cell research are profound, and that such research is therefore a moral imperative.
What is your opinion regarding the use of stem cells in medicine?
Should the federal government publicly fund stem cell research, as it funds many other kinds of therapeutic research?
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Psychologists and neurologists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions? The characteristics of neurological disorders and our natural affinity towards them, reveal clues about the narrative’s power to influence beliefs and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) brings to life Lewis Carroll’s imagination, inspired by mathematics and neurobiology. In Wonderland, Alice struggles to keep her size and proportions straight but finds that the bizarre world around her prevents her from doing either very easily. Researchers often cite Alice’s growing and shrinking as support for the idea that the novel is saturated with symbolism.
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice, (she was so surprised that she quite forgot how to speak good English,) “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed almost out of sight, they were getting so far off,) “oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I can’t! I shall be a great deal too far off to bother myself about you: you must manage the best way you can—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”
~ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Over the past century and a half since the original publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a number of scientists, doctors, and literary critics have speculated as to what real-world dispositions inspired the illusions found in Carroll’s renowned work of fiction. Carroll’s compelling story is rife with neurological disorders and derangement. Historical evidence and conjecture paint Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as less of a mere children’s tale and more of a symbolic depiction of the author’s views on novel algebraic concepts and his mental milieu. One interesting suggestion to the inspiration behind Alice’s potion-induced shrinking and growing is that Carroll may have experienced physical sensations of bodily distortion, possibly stemming from migraine-induced hallucination.
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A rare form of migraine, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome causes people to see their own bodies or those of others askew. It typically occurs without the onset of a headache, but is usually associated with a personal or familial history of migraines. It can impact one’s vision, hearing and sense of time, causing it to seem either accelerated or slowed down.
English psychiatrist John Todd, who coined the syndrome’s name in Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1955, compared the visions to those in “the parabolic mirrors of a fun-fair.” He wrote that his patients reported perceiving the body as either too big or too small and that the world seemed unreal. Treating an episode of Alice in Wonderland syndrome may be like trying to catch a harried rabbit, but medications used to prevent migraines may provide help for those with frequent episodes.
Todd and other scholars speculated that Carroll suffered from visual aura migraine symptoms that may have inspired some of the author’s fanciful narratives. Carroll’s diary entries reveal that he consulted an oculist in the years before writing Wonderland, and that later, after the publication of the Alice series, he explicitly experienced migraine hallucinations. This fact “arouses the suspicion that Alice trod the paths and byways of a Wonderland well known to her creator,” as Todd so eloquently stated. Carroll represents a fascinating case of a neurological condition in a talented individual, who was then able to use his experiences to give deeper meaning and poignancy to his art.
Carroll is not the only writer who has been documented as having a neurological condition. A score of eminent authors and artists, including Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), likely had hypergraphia (an overwhelming urge to paint or write) and other symptoms of mania and temporal lobe epilepsy.
The complexity of the human mind leaves it vulnerable to a number of neurological disorders and illusions that alter the perception of the world such that it doesn’t accurately reflect reality. While this can be distressing and debilitating to the person who is afflicted, such alterations can serve as excellent inspiration for speculative fiction. What sets speculative fiction apart from most other fiction genres is that it often depicts what we would normally consider a delusion as an accurate depiction of reality.
Individuals who suffer from Capgras syndrome believe that one or more of their loved ones has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. Whereas in the related Fregoli syndrome, it is perceived that different people are in fact a single individual changing shape. Examples of this include John W. Campbell’s shape-shifting alien in the novella “Who Goes There?” (1938); the alien pods in Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955); and the robotic housewives in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1975).
Yet another peculiarity of the human psyche is inattentional blindness, a phenomenon in which an observer doesn’t perceive individuals or objects that are in plain sight. This principle was applied by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where it was used to disguise large spaceships from people whose predisposition was to only see what they were expecting to see. In a more serious vein, inattentional blindness also plays a major role in Peter Watts’ science fiction novel Blindsight—as do several other neurological disorders.
Not too surprisingly, some of the stories I’ve mentioned have a strong element of horror to them. While it’s frightening to think that our own brains might malfunction in such a way that we begin to perceive impostors all around us, I think it is even worse to consider that such illusory dispositions actually exist. Neurological disorders make for riveting storytelling and there are many perversities of the human mind that have yet to be demonstrated in fiction.
Works Cited
- “The Neurology of Alice” by Andrew Larner (Larner AJ. ACNR 4(6):35-36 (2005)). [Link via Mind Hacks]
- Todd J. “The Syndrome of Alice in Wonderland” Can Med Assoc J. 73(9):701-704 (1955)
- Rolak LA. “Literary neurologic syndromes. Alice in Wonderland.” Arch Neurol. 48(6):649-61 (1991) [subscription required]
- Larner AJ “Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: an early report of prosopagnosia?” J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2004:75; doi:10.1136/jnnp.2003.027599 [subscription required]
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Recently I was discussing, with Ms. Square, the sometimes vexed question of media literacy. In what sense should individuals be literate today—more specifically in what mode or medium? Does centralizing focus on literacy in one approach diminish aptitude in another. For example, do web literate “youth” languish their ability to read, or even worse, to concentrate? There are a number of ongoing concerns about media literacy today. All of this perhaps implies the need for a new mode of comprehension. Ongoing variability in a very dynamic climate prods individuals to adapt to the shifts that are frequently occurring.
Is the ability to make effective use of new and emerging communication and information technologies essential to the realization of competent citizenship? By what standards?
Should media studies be seen as advanced vocationalism and nothing more?
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Climate change not only presents us with a major ecological crisis but a global political crisis as well. It is clear from the failure of the Copenhagen talks that the international system of states is too inadequate to enable a response to the challenge of climate change. Many people blame political leaders for the failure of these discussions, but the problem is not our leaders (many of whom seem to be genuinely concerned with responding to climate change). The problem is the system of competing states, the international system, which has come to define the general political climate. The global capitalist system that we know today has grown up through competition and negotiation between states, facilitated by international law. However, because the international system is premised on competition, it makes it difficult for coalitions of states to band together to address common problems.
I think that climate change calls for a new political ecology. This problem is like nothing the human race has ever faced before: it is global in scope and potentially cataclysmic in its effects. The political system of competing states that we have at the moment prevents us from even responding to the problem. Our only hope is to transform the political workings that are currently in place. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds: the infrastructure that will enable this transformation is already in place and the process is underway. The use of the internet is not so much a new idea for tackling climate change as it is an attempt to focus attention on how new internet technologies are already transforming the way that people all over the world understand themselves as empowered political agents. I think that in the next few years we will see global climate action networks start to play an increasingly powerful role in world affairs, as people come to appreciate the impotence of the international state system for tackling climate change. The way ahead lies in global grassroots action, coordinated through online platforms for participation. If we continue with politics as usual, there is no hope for the future.
The internet is rapidly evolving from a space for sharing information to a space for collaboration. The open source movement is leading this development. Ten years ago, “open source” was a collaborative approach to designing software online. Today open source is becoming a generalized “culture”–an attitude and approach to designing innovative solutions to all sorts of problems, used in business, government, and the non-profit sector. My thought is that an open source approach to the war on global climate change could transform the nature of this struggle. Currently people all over the planet are waiting for their governments to take action on this problem. For people who care about the future of the planet, it is deeply frustrating to see how slowly the process is going, but we don’t need to wait for governments to fight this war themselves. By setting up a series of online platforms for collaboration that would enable people to freely contribute to the grassroots struggle against climate change, we would not only encourage all sorts of new ideas, interventions, and initiatives; we would also facilitate the kind of global transformation in political consciousness that I was speaking of before. By working and creating together across borders, acting towards a common goal, people would come to realize a new form of political identity beyond the nation state.
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Life is taunting me. It’s running past and throwing moments at me: the taste of the air, the smell of the grass after the rain, the hot pavement under my feet, the feeling of his hands entwined in mine, the healing sounds of wind rushing past…I never feel like I have enough time to soak in each moment to its fullest, to observe every detail—how the rain sounds splattering against my windows or how the beads of water race each other to the earth. To sit on the sidewalk, eyes unblinking and observe life as it passes by would be such a blessing.
More than once, I’ve looked up in the sky at an airplane flying past and wondered where it was off to. Who was on that plane? What was their story? There are countless reasons to fly away or to somewhere…I am a dot on the ground below to those passengers. My chase after life and every moment is unknown to each of them as they look through their windows and think of home. I recall those shots you see in movies when, for example, they zoom in on an ant and slowly zoom out to a bustling New York City scene. I like to imagine something happening like that to me as I lay in the grass, hands under my head making friends with the clouds…The camera would slowly zoom out from me to my yard, to the city, to the country, to the planet, and then to the infinite cosmos beyond.
We’d all be little dots then. The millions of experiences slipping through each of our grasps simultaneously would seem like clockwork, or madness. I don’t really know which one because it’s another funny game Life likes to play with me. Life is madness as I am chasing, trying to catch each moment just long enough to let it go, but when I look behind me each moment is slowly making a masterpiece, as if it’s clockwork. Stringing all of these moments together is a fine, precarious thread—dreams. It’s the only thing I find I really have control over as I’m on this chase…the weaving of these dreams. However strong I make them determines how beautiful my masterpiece is as I look behind me and how well I can enjoy the fleeting moments that make up that masterpiece.
It’s funny when I meet people. I can feel a kind of aura of who they are reverberate around them. It’s a language I don’t quite understand as yet, this…innate language we all seem to share. The smile in someone’s eyes is universal…the same way a teary eye is understood. The subtleties of the soul and the interconnectivities between us all are much bigger than my mind can swallow. When I listen to a particular piece of music and there is a moment where I can feel a note get tangled inside of me, or when I see a sunset and can taste how sweet the color dripping from the sky feels in my eyes, I always wonder if those feelings also count as being that innate language. That if we just quiet ourselves from everything for just a few moments, just stop the chasing and let the moments slip by in front of our faces, we could feel ourselves change. Feel it the moment it happens.
The roads ahead are winding. I’m not sure which one I’m going to take, but I know I’ll be certain to drink in as many moments along the way as I can.
Cheers, Ms. Square.
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