Music Selections

[Joe Mahmood]

This song gives me an impression about Slavery especially for those tribal people caught from Africa when slaves trading was very common...

JONATHAN ROY - KEEPING ME ALIVE

 

[Joe Mahmood]

I got back from work today about 10.35pm just now. I'm working on permanent 2 pm to 10 pm shift. This is a six days work week and one day job. With the Covid 19 virus pandemic still around I can not be choosy about job. It is better to work than having no work and no income. Anyway, this is only a part time job and I'm getting paid $9 per hour.

Well, after work I'm feeling quite tired now and getting sleepy too. Tomorrow is another day at work for me.

Thanks for listening. Goodnight wherever you are...

TOPIC FT. A7S - BREAKING ME

 

[Joe Mahmood]

COLDPLAY - EVERYDAY LIFE




"I, for one, bear no ill-will against the British or against any people or individual. All creatures are of the same substance as all drops of water in the ocean are the same in substance. I believe that all of us, individual souls, living in this ocean of spirit, are the same with one another with the closest bond among ourselves. A drop that separates soon dries up and any soul that believes itself separate from others is likewise destroyed."

~ Gandhi

Extracted from the book THE FIFTH DIMENSION - An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick

http://www.johnhick.org.uk/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

BREAKING BENJAMIN FT. LACEY STURM - DEAR AGONY




Thought I share this before I return the book to the library today.

Thanks.


People go to their temples
To greet Me;
How simple and ignorant are My children
Who think that I live in isolation.

Why don't they come and greet Me
In the procession of life, where I always live,
In the farms, the factories, and the market,
Where I encourage those
Who earn their living by the sweat of their brow?

Why don't they come and greet Me
In the cottages of the poor
And find Me blessing the poor and the needy
And wiping the tears of widows and orphans?

Why don't they come and greet Me
Among those who are trampled upon
By those proud of pelf and power,
And see Me beholding their suffering and pouring out
compassion?
And why don't they come and greet Me
Among women sunk in sin and shame
Where I sit by them to bless and uplift?

I am sure
They can never miss Me
If they try to meet Me
In the sweat and struggle of life
And in the tears and tragedies of the poor.

~ Dr. Khushdeva Singh (1902 - 1985)

Extracted from the book THE FIFTH DIMENSION - An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick

http://www.johnhick.org.uk/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

DIDO FT. KENDRICK LAMAR - LET US MOVE ON




PARABLE OF THE RAFT

A traveller comes to a wide stretch of water. The side he is on is dangerous, but the other side is safe. However there is no bridge or boat. So he collects grass, sticks and branches to make a raft, and crosses to the other side. Because the raft has been so useful, he lifts it onto his head and carries it with him.

~ Buddha

"He should leave it behind. It has served its purpose and now can only be a hindrance."

~ Buddha

Extracted from the book THE FIFTH DIMENSION - An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick

http://www.johnhick.org.uk/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

APOCALYPTICA FT. LACEY - BROKEN PIECES




THE INFINITE MICROBIOTA

When we think of organisms able to conquer and colonize different environments, we tend to place human beings at the top of the list, but the reality is very different: we are no more than mere passing visitors in a world completely governed by an intractable number of microorganisms, among which the most abundant are bacteria.

Bacteria have always been the most abundant organisms on the planet, and since their inception, 160 million years ago, they have been responsible for giving the world the features that have made life possible at more complex levels.

Bacteria are the only beings capable of living in every ecological niche, as they have multiple mechanisms of genetic recombination that give them the capacity for rapid mutation and adaptation to new habitats within an incredibly short period, while any other animal organism would require years. Bacteria have enabled oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere and nitrogen in the soil, allowing other forms of life to take advantage of these conditions; they have decomposed rock into fertile land, providing ecosystems with the organisms and elements necessary to perpetuate life. The human body, composed of 100 trillion cells, is colonized by a microbiota of 90 billion organisms of 200 different types that live in perpetual balance and without which our lives would be endangered.

The number of bacteria in the universe is incalculable, but it is clear that it verges upon infinity.

The term "microbiota" refers to the community of living organisms in a certain niche, the most commonly found include Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Candida albicans.

Extracted from SECRETS OF INFINITY by editor Antonio Lamua

 

[Joe Mahmood]

Thanks for listening. Goodnight wherever you are...

HALESTORM FT. AMY LEE - BREAK IN

https://youtu.be/OUuVReJSrc4

*********************************************************************************

17th January 2021

BREAK IN SONG LYRICS

Put your lighter in the air and lead me back home
When it's all said and done, I'll follow the echoes
I hear you night after night calling out my name, ooh
And I find myself running to meet you

I didn't want to escape
From the bricks that I laid down

You are the only one
The only one that sees me
Trusts me and believes me
You are the only one
The only one that knows me
And in the dark to show me

Yeah, it's perfectly reckless
Damn, you leave me defenseless
So break in
Break in

You let me fall apart without letting go
Then you pick up the pieces and you make me whole
I didn't want to escape
From the bricks that I laid down

You are the only one
The only one that sees me
Trusts me and believes me
You are the only one
The only one that knows me
And in the dark to show me

Yeah, it's perfectly reckless
Damn, you leave me defenseless
So break in

And take everything I have
Till there is nothing left
Till it's just your voice in my head
And when the lights come on
You see me as I am
You're still inside me

You are the only one
The only one that sees me
That trusts me and believes me
You are the only one
The only one that knows me
And in the dark you show me

Yeah, it's perfectly reckless
Damn, you leave me defenseless
So break in
Break in

Put your lighter in the air
And lead me back home

***************************************************************************

13th September 2020

John 8:1-11
New Living Translation

A Woman Caught in Adultery

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

“Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”

They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

“No, Lord,” she said.

And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”

********************************************************************************************

4th December 2020

How the Ancient Code of Hammurabi Reveals a Society Both Similar and Alien to Ours

The almost 300 laws that make up Hammurabi’s Code show us what daily life was like more than 3,500 years ago.

By Nathaniel Scharping
December 2, 2020 12:45 AM


Great rulers throughout history have built monuments to themselves and their achievements, which were meant to outlast their short lives. From mighty pyramids to monolithic statues, the goal was to make a lasting impression upon future generations. Some rulers wished to impart their might, others to align themselves with the gods. For Hammurabi, king of Babylon, his legacy was the law.

The Code of Hammurabi is inscribed on a stone (or stela) of black basalt more than seven feet tall. Written in cuneiform script, in Akkadian, are laws concerning criminal behavior, family interactions, economic transactions and more. Punishments for each transgression accompany the laws, ranging from monetary fines to death.

Hammurabi’s laws echo some of our legal philosophies today, though filtered through the lens of a society that often looked very different from ours. Slavery was legal, and women and children were assumed to be subservient to adult men.

The stela’s goal was multifold: To lay out the laws of the land clearly for citizens, but also to establish Hammurabi as law-giver and judge even after his death. Fittingly, the laws are accompanied by words and images making clear the divine provenance of his kingship. The top features a bas relief depicting Hammurabi receiving the gods’ blessing, below which are the laws themselves, and a prologue and epilogue cataloging the king’s achievements and divine right to rule.

The collection of 282 laws sits today in the Louvre in Paris, its dictates preserved for nearly four thousand years. The stela itself was discovered in 1901 by French archaeologists, and it’s one of the oldest examples of writing of significant length ever found. To archaeologists today, the collection of laws is a treasure trove, revealing not only the existence of an ancient legal system, but examples of labor relations, family life, societal organization, and more.

A Code Written in Stone

The massive stone and its laws were placed in a public temple, either in Babylon or the ancient city of Sippar, both in modern-day Iraq, sometime near the end of the king’s reign in the 18th century B.C.E. The prominent placement meant the laws were clearly visible, and the epilogue advises anyone with a legal dispute to bring it before the stela itself and and consider their case under its watchful gaze:

“Let the oppressed, who has a case at law, come and stand before this my image as king of righteousness; let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words: the inscription will explain his case to him; he will find out what is just, and his heart will be glad.”

The laws themselves are among the earliest examples of writing of any length discovered, and were copied as writing exercises by scribes for over a thousand years. This meant the laws themselves were distributed and read widely, and would go on to influence legal thinking for millennia to come. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Hammurabi was the originator of all, or even most, of the laws he laid down. Other written examples of ancient law, such as the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu and the Laws of Eshnunna, predate the Code of Hammurabi by several hundred years, and include many similarities. Neither is as comprehensive, however.

Hammurabi’s laws cover a great deal of legal territory, and scholars believe they were likely drawn from real cases that the king or his judges presided over. Examples include laws governing crimes such as theft, murder and adultery, as well as familial interactions like marriage, divorce and inheritance. There are laws setting out wages for laborers, and recompense for fires and other damages. Some of the laws look familiar to us today, while others feel alien. For example, the 135th law details what should happen if a husband is taken as a prisoner of war and his wife leaves his house. (It’s OK if there’s no food.)

However, there remains some debate today over whether the laws were meant to be binding, or simply used as precedents for legal cases. We also have little evidence of how closely the laws were followed in Hammurabi’s time. Scholars do agree, though, that Mesopotamia had a formalized justice system, which would have necessarily depended on laws such as these.

Crime and Punishment

Along with the laws, the Code of Hammurabi also prescribes punishments for breaking them. Many feel harsh to us today: Death is a common sentence, whether for murder, robbery or failing to pay a mercenary. In some special cases, even the method of death is specified. Incest was punishable by burning, adulterous murder by impaling. Cutting off hands was another popular punishment if, for example, a son struck his father, or a field hand stole the crops they were tending. These punishments also include perhaps the most well-known of Hammurabi’s laws: the infamous “eye for an eye” dictate.

But such even-handed justice was not always the case. The punishments vary significantly in relation to the status of the criminal and the victim. If a physician accidentally kills a free man, for instance, the doctor’s hands will be cut off. If a physician kills a slave, however, they need only replace the slave. Similarly, if a free-born man strikes someone of equal rank, he must pay a penalty in gold. But if a slave strikes a free-born man, the slave’s ear must be cut off.

Women, too, dealt with more restrictive laws. If a woman neglected and left her husband, she might be cast into the water; if a husband neglected his wife, his only punishment was that she could leave him. Men were also allowed to take another wife if their first wife bore them no children (though the law did stipulate that he must continue to care for her). But some protections for women did exist. If a wife became sick, the husband was forbidden from leaving her, for example; and if a man divorced his wife, she had rights to some of his property in some cases.

Other laws established fair wages and terms for conducting business in ancient Mesopotamia. Prices for building houses, renting farm animals, hiring laborers, building boats, and more are laid out clearly. Punishments for poor work are also detailed — if a house should fall down and kill its owner, the builder would be killed, too. Or if a boat should leak, the shipwright must fix it at their own cost.

Hammurabi’s Long Shadow

The Code of Hammurabi’s influence extends beyond Mesopotamia. The Bible contains language nearly identical to the Code’s policy of in-kind punishment, referencing “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” several times. And some scholars have argued that the Biblical Covenant Code, which lays out many laws for Christians and Jews, stems largely from the Code of Hammurabi.

Elements of legal thinking present in Hammurabi’s time still exist today. The Code assumes a person’s innocence, for example, pending evidence to the contrary. The Mesopotamian legal system gave both accused and accuser a chance to state their cases before a judge. The laws even accounted for poor legal judgments — the fifth law states that if a judge is found to have erred he must pay a fine and be removed from the bench. Forever.

Beyond insights into early jurisprudence, the collection of laws also offers a detailed look into an ancient society. We learn that not only did the Mesopotamians possess a legal system, but also a system of taxation. Marriage was bound by laws concerning dowries, properties, and the birth of children. Prostitution and slavery were both legal. Men could be conscripted into the king’s army to fight his battles. Wealthier landholders would commonly hire laborers for their fields, or rent out their oxen and donkeys for work.

We also see how rigidly segmented Mesopotamian society was. Slaves were at the bottom, but could be freed in some cases. Men born free had the most rights, while women were subject to additional restrictions on what they could own and what freedoms they had.

The Code of Hammurabi offers a glimpse into a society that is both similar to and distinct from ours. What ultimately unites us and the ancient Mesopotamians, though, is a recognition that functioning societies require a set of agreed-upon laws to function. A robust legal system is a prerequisite for humans to coexist near one another — something of which King Hammurabi was evidently keenly aware.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/th...rabi-reveals-a-society-both-similar-and-alien

 

[Joe Mahmood]

WITHIN TEMPTATION - MEMORIES




Here I have to take a common ground with all the religious people that believe in God. Most of them would naturally say God is Light. God is Good. None of them would say God is Darkness or God is Bad/Evil. They are definitely right not wrong. I would say too God is always Good. God is always Good and always Positive. God has no Negative essence.

However, this is the opinion and view of mine. God is always Good no negative or bad essence. God is always Good and God never get angry, judge, punish, belittle etcs upon you when you sin or disbelieve etcs on God. God is always Good and God never get angry etcs at you. In other words, when God is always Good what is there to forgive you even when you sin, curse etcs on God. God is always Good so therefore there is nothing to forgive.

Maybe I should explain to you in another way. God is Light. I think you still don't get me. How about this, if I say God is like...ENERGY. Why energy? Well, look around you, seen, unseen, on earth, in the Universe and within you too. Are there always Energy presence?

Where that Energy comes from and What created the Energy in the first place I dare say nobody knows. But it is there for US to use it. And whomever that created an invention or formulated an idea etcs, it depends on the motives whether it is for the good or bad. But again as I said, God is always Good. Energy is always Good too.

~ Joe Mahmood, 30th August 2020, Singapore.


THIS IS WHO YOU ARE

 

[Joe Mahmood]

PALOMA FAITH - BETTER THAN THIS




The Surprising Ways Your Breath Connects You to the Entire Planet

BREATHING IS SO universal and continuous that it can be easy to forget about—until we can’t do it anymore. Then it becomes symbolic of life itself. We take special note of words that are carried on final breaths, and sometimes we even cherish the physical substance of the breaths themselves. Henry Ford kept a glass test tube of air in his home for many years, and inside the tube was said to be a sample from the last breath of his late friend and fellow inventor Thomas Edison. According to sources at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, several such tubes are believed to have been left open to the air of the room near Edison’s deathbed. “Though he is mainly remembered for his work in electrical fields,” Edison’s son Charles reportedly said, “his real love was chemistry. It is not strange, but symbolic, that those test tubes were close to him at the end.” After Edison’s death, Charles had the tubes sealed and later passed one of them on to Ford as a memento.

Keep this in mind as you take your next breath. Notice how you tighten your diaphragm and relax the muscles in the walls of your chest. This effort alone consumes roughly 3 percent of your metabolic energy at rest, all in order to pull the equivalent volume of a grapefruit into your lungs. Trillions of air molecules are now trapped within your chest like fish in a net. Only a few of them, the oxygens, are what you’re after. An average adult uses nearly two pounds of them every day, and this particular breath full will help to keep you alive for the next few minutes. It will also connect you to the rest of life on Earth and to the planet itself in surprising ways that we will soon explore.

Earth Inhales and Exhales Oxygen Just Like You Do

Depending on the time of day and the season of the year, the air you walk through and pull into your lungs changes more than you might expect. This is just one of many discoveries by Ralph Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who tests the atmosphere the way a police officer might test your breath with a Breathalyzer.

For more than two decades Keeling has been measuring the oxygen content of air samples that are collected daily in Hawaii, Antarctica, and elsewhere, sealed into small containers, and shipped to his lab in La Jolla, California. Like traces of alcohol in someone’s breath, slight changes in the composition of the atmosphere can tell a lot about what the world’s combined masses of people, vegetation, and plankton are doing.

It is often said that forests are the “lungs of the planet” because they produce oxygen that we breathe, but the metaphor falls short in some respects. Lungs don’t produce oxygen but instead consume it, and Keeling’s work has shown that only about half of your oxygen comes from terrestrial plants. The rest is made by algae and cyanobacteria in lakes and oceans, with a small additional measure produced by the splitting of water vapor in the upper atmosphere by radiation from the sun and distant stars.

However, when combined with the carbon dioxide analyses that his late father, Charles David Keeling, launched at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958, the long-term oxygen records do show an almost eerie resemblance to the readouts of a medical breath-monitoring device. Annual pulses of oxygen are mirrored by cyclic drops in CO2, and together these data open a unique window on the atomic connections between plants and the earth.

When the elder Keeling first began to study the air, he expected it to vary a great deal from place to place. To his surprise, however, much of the variability vanished when samples were collected with consistent methods at remote locations where the air is free of local influences from respiring forests and cities. The atmosphere mixes more thoroughly and rapidly than scientists had hitherto realized, and average CO2 concentrations in Hawaii are remarkably similar to those at the Scripps pier in La Jolla.

Equally noteworthy, however, were various kinds of rhythmic oscillations that appeared in the gas records. Every day the carbon dioxide concentrations dropped slightly, only to recover at night, and larger seasonal pulses occurred with dips in summer and peaks in winter. When Ralph Keeling began to measure oxygen to complement his father’s work, his results showed similar patterns but in reverse. With these data you can watch the atmosphere respond to the breathing of countless plants and microbes as the earth spins on its axis and circles the sun.

The pacemaker of these pulses is sunlight. When dawn awakens California, the lawns and palm trees of La Jolla begin to pump oxygen into the air and pull carbon dioxide out of it, as does the Pacific plankton drifting offshore. When that portion of the world spins onward into the shadow of night again, the oxygen production shuts down, but the cellular CO2 factories keep running and quickly drive local carbon dioxide levels back up again while oxygen levels drop.

A similar pattern emerges in alternating hemispheres through the seasons, as well. When plants sprout and leaf out in spring, O2 rises rapidly and CO2 declines. Later in the year when photosynthesis slows and dead leaves begin to decay and release carbon dioxide, the opposite trends prevail.

The Keeling records clearly show that we affect the atmosphere, too, but in more disturbing ways. In early 2013 average concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million (ppm, or a ten-thousandth of a percent), having risen from an average closer to 312 ppm during the 1950s. Most of that change represents the burning of fossil fuels along with the decay and fires associated with deforestation. Unlike the photosynthesizers, these artificial “lungs” of the modern world consume O2 and release CO2 like our own, and they do it continuously on a massive scale.

While the long-term carbon dioxide record tilts upward along with global average temperatures, the oxygen trend points downward. According to the Scripps O2 Program site, oxygen concentrations at La Jolla dropped by 0.03 percent between 1992 and 2009. This, as Ralph Keeling said in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, is the global “signature of combustion.”

Should we now worry about running out of oxygen in addition to global warming? Not according to Keeling. In another Union-Tribune interview he explained that there is plenty of oxygen in the air, and the tiny percentage of loss of oxygen in itself isn’t an issue. Rather, “the trend in oxygen helps us to understand ... what’s controlling the rise in CO2.” In other words, declining oxygen shows how closely tied we are to this planet, and how much we now affect the atomic world around us.

You're Literally Breathing the Same Stuff Leonardo da Vinci Did

From space, Earth resembles a floating blue bead, and if you keep that image in mind it will help to drive home an important lesson. As abundant as atoms are on this planet, their numbers are finite. Watch a satellite video of the clouds that sweep across the face of the world, and you will see in an instant that the winds that carry them over one curved horizon may reappear on the opposite horizon. When viewed from a great distance the sky resembles a shockingly thin film, and most of its molecules are packed into a mere 10-mile slice of a total planetary diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. At sea level you might find more than 10 trillion trillion atoms in a cubic yard of air, but just outside that vaporous skin is the relative vacuum of the solar system. The next time you see a photo of the earth taken from space, try to convince yourself that a pollutant-spewing smokestack anywhere in the world doesn’t unleash potentially harmful substances into the same precious air supply that keeps you and your loved ones alive.

Keeling showed that oxygen gas emitted by plants and plankton mixes throughout each respective hemisphere within two months and spreads worldwide in a little more than a year. The sensitivity of the oxygen and carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere to the activities of living things shows that recycling is not just a passing fad but a tradition that has always been practiced on the atomic level by all life on Earth. To live, rather than to merely exist like inanimate rock, is to borrow and repurpose the elements of the world around you, and then release them again.

As brilliant as he was, Henry Ford apparently failed to realize that he needed no test tube to capture the atomic essence of Edison’s last breath. You can collect a sample of it anytime—along with samples from the last breaths of Jesus, Shakespeare, and Leonardo—and even with a few bits of air that carried your own first cries as a newborn. It’s easy to do, here on this sky-blue sphere of atoms. Just take a breath.

Excerpts from YOUR ATOMIC SELF by Curt Stager

https://www.wired.com/2014/12/your-atomic-self-how-your-breath-connects-you-to-universe/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

LADY ANTEBELLUM - HELLO WORLD




You Are Made of Waste

Searching for the ultimate example of recycling? Look in the mirror.

BY CURT STAGER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY YUKO SHIMIZU

You may think of yourself as a highly refined and sophisticated creature—and you are. But you are also full of discarded, rejected, and recycled atomic elements. Don’t worry, though—so is almost everyone and everything else.

Carbon: Your inky nails

Look at one of your fingernails. Carbon makes up half of its mass, and roughly one in eight of those carbon atoms recently emerged from a chimney or a tailpipe. Coal-fired power plants, petroleum-guzzling cars, and kitchen gas stoves release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Each of those waste molecules is a carbon atom borne on two atomic wings of oxygen. Fossil-based carbon dioxide molecules that are not soaked up by the oceans or stranded in the upper atmosphere are eventually captured by plants, shorn of their oxygen wings, and woven into botanical sugars and starches. Eventually, some of them end up in bread, sweets, and vegetables, while others help form carbon-rich animal tissues, finding their way into meat and dairy products. Historically, atmospheric carbon dioxide was mainly replenished by volcanoes, forest fires, and biotic respiration. Today, one quarter of atmospheric CO2 is the result of fossil fuel combustion, whether it rose from smokestacks or was displaced from the oceans. (When fossil-fuel CO2 dissolves into ocean water, it displaces already-dissolved carbon dioxide derived from natural sources.) And because all of the carbon in your body derives from ingested organic matter, which in turn obtains it from the atmosphere, your fingernails and the rest of the organic matter in your body are built, in part, from emissions.

Radioactive Carbon-14: Your pearly whites

When you smile, the gleam of your teeth obscures a slight glow from radioactive waste. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons scattered so much radioactive carbon-14 into the atmosphere that it contaminated virtually every ecosystem and human. Several thousand unstable radiocarbon atoms explode within and among your cells every second as their unstable nuclei undergo spontaneous radioactive decay. Some are the natural products of cosmic rays that can turn atmospheric nitrogen into carbon-14, while others result from the decay of unstable mineral elements that are found in soil. But many of them represent the echoes of thermonuclear airbursts from the Cold War, finding their way into our water supply and meals. If they happen to disintegrate within your DNA, they can damage your genes. And many of them are bound up in your teeth. Unlike most of the atoms in your body, those embedded in your strong, stable tooth enamel have been with you ever since you ingested them through your umbilical cord and your infant feeding. If you were born during the early 1960s, you have more nuclear waste in your teeth than if you were born later, when soils and oceans had had time to bury radioactive atoms. In fact, forensic scientists use the proportion of bomb carbon in tooth enamel to determine the age of unidentified human remains.

Oxygen: Your leafy breath

The oxygen in your lungs and bloodstream is a highly reactive waste product generated by vegetation and microbes. Trees, herbs, algae, and blue-green bacteria split oxygen atoms out of water molecules during photosynthesis. They use most of the resultant gas for their own purposes, but thankfully some leaks out to sustain you. In fact it makes up about a fifth of the air you breathe. Your cells harness oxygen to release energy from chemical bonds in the food you consume. Oxygen absorbs electrons released by broken food molecules, which attract hydrogen ions, resulting in a molecular waste of your own making: metabolic water, which comprises one tenth of your body fluids. An average adult carries between 8 and 10 pounds of homemade wastewater within them, and one in 10 of your tears are the metabolic by-products of your breathing and eating.

Nitrogen: Your natural curls

The next time you brush your hair, think of the nitrogenous waste that helped create it. All of your proteins, including hair keratin, contain formerly airborne nitrogen atoms. But the nitrogen in air is biologically inert. For nitrogen to become a component of your hair, it has to be converted into a more accessible form. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria is one way that can happen. They live among the roots of beans, peas, and other legumes, consuming atmospheric nitrogen and releasing it as ammonia, a kind of microbial manure that fertilizes soil in which plants grow. When you eat a plant, you consume formerly atmospheric nitrogen. Every flash of lightning and every automotive spark plug emits a puff of nitrogen oxide, which can dissolve into raindrops and fall to earth as a form of fertilizer, again finding its way into food webs through plants. But most of the nitrogen in modern foods comes from urea and ammonium nitrate fertilizers artificially fixed by industrial processes. In ages past, the nitrogen in human hair came mainly from bacterial waste and lightning. But today, unless you eat a strictly organic diet, you run your hairbrush through nitrogenous frameworks that are mostly of human origin.

Iron: Your ancient blood

When you cut yourself, the wreckage of stars spills out. Every atom of iron in your blood, which helps your heart shuttle oxygen from your lungs to your cells, once helped destroy a massive star. The fierce nuclear fusion reactions that set stars ablaze create the atomic elements of life. As the star ages, it fuses progressively larger elements, such as silicon, sulfur, and calcium. Eventually, iron atoms are fused. The problem is that iron fusion consumes as much energy as it produces, so it weakens the star. If the star is big enough, it will collapse in on itself, its outer layers rebounding against the dense inner core, and a supernova explosion will result. The blast sprays out iron at supersonic speeds, filling great swathes of space with debris that can form new solar systems. The iron in your frying pan, house keys, and blood is essentially cosmic shrapnel from the tremendous explosions that ripped through our galaxy billions of years ago. The same blasts also released carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other elements of life, which later produced the sun, the Earth, and eventually—you.

Curt Stager is an ecologist and climate scientist at Paul Smith’s College. He is the author of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life On Earth, and has written for National Geographic and Fast Company. He also co-hosts a weekly science program on North Country Public Radio.

http://m.nautil.us/issue/7/waste/you-are-made-of-waste

 

[Joe Mahmood]

ALTER BRIDGE - OPEN YOUR EYES

https://youtu.be/8eYHvrgPqQ0


Why Most of Your Body Is Younger Than You Are

When you take a sip of water it doesn’t just slake your thirst. It literally becomes you. The water that runs down your gullet will, within minutes and without processing of any kind, become some of the dominant fluid in your veins and your flesh. Most of your blood is simply tap water with cells, salts, and organic molecules floating in it. Some of the rubbery squishiness of your earlobe poured out of a bottle or a can just a short time ago. And much of the moisture in your eyes only recently fell from rainclouds. Your mouth is the portal through which water normally enters your body, but you are quite a leaky vessel. A hydrogen isotope study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that the sedentary men under examination consumed and lost about seven pints of body water per day, with four pints leaving through urine and two or three pints through sweat and breath moisture. Vigorous exercise can boost non-urine water losses to one or two pints per hour. Now let’s see what logic can do with those facts. Nearly two-thirds of your weight comes from water, and your body is an eddy in a stream of that common fluid. Surely the liquid that you slurp from a fountain is not alive, and you don’t consider it murder to stomp on a puddle of water. Therefore most of you is not alive at all, nor is it even permanent or unique enough to merit a personal name.

Long, Beautiful Hair

Next let’s consider your hair. It is a slow-motion shower of lifeless protein that sprays out of your head at roughly half an inch per month or six inches per year. Each filament is a tangle of carbon and oxygen atoms that are outnumbered two to one by hydrogen and sprinkled with nitrogen along with a dash of sulfur. The atoms in the roots are derived from meals that you ate within the last few days, along with some drinks, metabolic water, and your own recycled cells. Your fingernails are also full of keratin, and they roll out of your fingertips at three to four millimeters per month, on average. Your toenails grow half as fast but they, too, release atoms from their leading edges as you cut or wear them away, and you also shed millions of microscopic keratinous skin flakes every day. If you could fast-forward a video of your hair, nail, and epidermal growth, you would seem to smolder with skin dust while jungles of protein poured from your hairy parts and curly peels of keratin shot from your fingertips and toes. Even at the usual slow pace, that’s a lot of atoms, all of which must be replaced if you are to resemble yourself for very long. One way of summarizing this unusual time-lapse view of yourself is that you are a walking fountain of carbonated water vapor, liquid water, and protein. Much of it trails off behind you in an invisible mist of exhalations and exfoliations, ending up in the dust bunnies beneath your bed or, should you misbehave badly enough, in the nostrils of a bloodhound. If you ever do become a fugitive of that sort, then perhaps you might attempt a plea of atomic innocence should you be brought before a court of law. “It wasn’t I, Your Honor,” you can truthfully say (and perhaps with excessive grammatical propriety), thanks to the rapid turnover of matter in your body.

The Sum of Your Parts

There is a lot more to your body now than there was when you could still fit inside your mother’s womb, and that fact alone makes it obvious that most of your body is younger than you are. But imagining yourself as a temporary collection of cells can also make the transitory nature of your body more apparent, too. A study by the Italian researcher Eva Bianconi and her colleagues recently put the average number of cells in an adult human body at thirty-seven trillion. They vary wildly in shape and size, with diameters ranging from eight microns for a red blood cell and about twenty-two microns for a liver cell to roughly one hundred microns for a mature egg cell (five hundred microns would span a grain of salt). Some of them may last for a few days or weeks before being recycled and replaced, while others may last a lifetime. How can you tell which is which? One way to estimate the turnover rates of human cells is to measure the amount of carbon-14 in them. During the Cold War, atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons turned atmospheric nitrogen atoms into radioactive carbon-14 that still contaminates air and oceans today. Moving into plants as carbon dioxide, the unstable atoms of bomb carbon have worked their way through food chains and lodged in the bodies of everyone on Earth, including you. Since 1963 when above-ground testing was banned, radiocarbon concentrations have declined as carbon-rich organic matter has been buried in ocean sediments, and the change is reflected in our bodies. If there is any bright side to thermonuclear pollution, it may be this shifting concentration of bomb carbon that provides a global isotopic tracer for determining the ages of our cells. Olaf Bergmann, a cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, recently coauthored a paper in Science that used this technique to document the growth of new cells in heart muscle. His approach resolved a long-standing conflict between experts who believed that the heart is renewed as many as four times during a lifetime and those who believed that we die with essentially the same heart we were born with. By measuring the radiocarbon contents of cardiomyocyte cells from which heart muscle is made, Bergmann’s team found that the cardiac tissues of relatively young people who spent their entire lives amid the earth’s contaminated carbon reservoir were far more radioactive overall than those of older people who were born before the nuclear tests began. From these and similar findings, it appears that you do continue to form some new heart tissue throughout your life, and that you do so at different rates as you age. According to Bergmann’s calculations, you replace about 1 percent of your cardiac muscle cells per year at age twenty and half as many at age seventy-five. Nevertheless, you still keep most such cells with you throughout your adult life. Similar radiocarbon tracer studies suggest that the average replacement rate of most cells in your body is between seven and ten years, but some cells fall well outside that range. Your heart, for example, is full of connective tissue, blood vessels, and other structures that are replaced more often than your cardiomyocytes. A median annual turnover rate of 18 percent for those components suggests that most of your heart is less than five years old. In a follow-up paper in Science, Bergmann and the biologist Jonas Frisén reported that nerve cells within the olfactory bulb and hippocampus of a human brain are continuously regenerated. This means that when a whiff of something sparks a memory, be it a smoky campfire or a familiar perfume, the neurons that originally encoded those sensations may no longer be with you, and the memories may now be preserved by cells that never experienced them. Most of your other brain cells date back to your infancy, but tracer studies now show that some fresh neurons can also appear within your cerebral cortex, perhaps registering new experiences from day to day.

Cellular Churn

Cells that line your digestive tract are replaced every few days, which is not surprising considering the abuse they take from stomach acids, bile, and erosion by the passage of food and waste. Work by the physiologist Bernd Lindemann posits a lifespan of about ten days for the taste cells in your mouth, and the dermatologist Gerald Weinstein and his colleagues estimate a mean turnover time of thirty-nine days for skin cells, which spend only a couple of weeks in your outermost layers before flaking off by the hundreds of millions. This continuous shedding gives you a new wrapper of skin once or twice a month and a steady supply of house dust to keep up with. The lives of your red blood cells are rather “nasty brutish and short.” After tumbling through hundreds of miles of aortic rapids and hard-to-squeeze-through capillaries, and after repeatedly swelling and shrinking in thousands of transits through the osmotic jungles of your kidneys, most of them wear out within four months or so and must be replaced by progenitor cells in your spleen and bone marrow. And according to the science journalist Nicholas Wade, the replacement times of three hundred to five hundred days that liver cells enjoy can grow you a whole new liver every year or two. The Swedish biologist Kirsty Spalding and others have found that your fat-storage cells persist for about a decade, which is good news for people who struggle to lose weight. It was long thought that starvation merely deflates fat cells rather than killing them off, leaving them to fill up again like grocery bags when a dieter tires of feeling hungry. But if you can stick to a healthy regimen for long enough, it seems that you can help to stabilize your weight by outliving some of your fat cells. Your bones and muscles are constantly remodeled. About 3 percent of the dense outermost layers of your skeleton and up to a quarter of the porous bone in the knobby parts of your limb joints are recycled every year, and experts calculate an average life cycle of a decade or so for your skeleton as a whole. The muscle cells between your ribs live for about fifteen years, according to Nicholas Wade, and the collagen cores of your tendons are essentially permanent once they finish developing during your late teens. Recent isotopic analyses by researchers in Denmark and Sweden show that the oldest easily identifiable structures in your body are the crystalline lens proteins of your eyes and the enamel of your teeth. If you carry healthy ovaries, then you may also carry thousands to millions of microscopic oocytes that formed while you were still in your mother’s womb, making the initial cells of your potential future children nearly as old as you are. And as for tattoos, although younger than you they are permanent because the ink is not cellular and therefore not recycled; it is more like the persistent pebbles in a cornfield than the ephemeral crops of skin. In sum, your tissues are a mishmash of newborn, persistent, and dying cells, most of which are relatively new. Therefore, whatever you have supposedly done to deserve credit or blame, it really wasn’t you after all, was it? In this mad worldview the most likely culprits would be your eyes, your teeth, some brain matter, and perhaps the seeds of your unborn children.

Excerpts from YOUR ATOMIC SELF by Curt Stager

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-most-of-your-body-is-younger-than-you-are

 

[Joe Mahmood]

EMBRACE - AT ONCE




Your Atomic Self: The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe

By Curt Stager

One can only wonder how Albert Einstein might have wrestled with the still-open question of how inanimate atoms produce life. He freely acknowledged the limitations of human understanding, including his own, and in July 1945, he wrote, “We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.” Science alone can take us only so far in our efforts to grasp the world, but sometimes teaming it with the arts can carry us the rest of the way forward on that journey. As a musician, Einstein understood this, and perhaps his love of music offered him insights into how life arises from atoms in ways that are now described in terms of “emergence.”

An emergent phenomenon arises from relatively simple components that somehow become more than the sum of their parts, as random scratches become letters if they are shaped in certain ways. Letters can be grouped into words with meanings that depend upon their sequences. The letters e, l, f, and i, for example, can become “file” or “life.” Emerging from the same kind of mysterious zone wherein the arrangements of words produce literature, teeming atoms and molecules somehow become living cells. In similar fashion a thousand minnows produce an undulating shoal of silver, a million citizens make a city with a distinctive identity, billions of coral polyps produce a complex and colorful reef, and trillions of mindless cells create a colony that walks, talks, and thinks of itself as a person.

Music, in this context, is an emergent phenomenon that arises from sound waves in air, and even if it can’t completely explain the origins of life, it can help describe life while also making it more enjoyable. Einstein was an excellent violinist who particularly loved Mozart’s music, and as his fame spread he was often invited to perform with some of the world’s most accomplished musicians. Pianist Artur Balsam, when asked about the musical abilities of the revered author of relativity theory, replied, “He is relatively good.”

But Einstein’s relationship to music was more personal than professional, and although he could have owned the best of instruments, he preferred to lug an inexpensive fiddle in a battered case wherever he went. This included Camp Knollwood on Lower Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack mountains, where he often played alone on the veranda and also enjoyed playing duets with the concert violinist Frances Magnes, another frequent summer visitor to Knollwood. “If I were not a physicist,” Einstein once said, “I would probably be a musician.... I see my life in terms of music.”

What can music reveal about the atomic nature of life? Physicists sometimes compare the oscillation patterns of orbiting electrons to standing waves in the resonant strings of musical instruments, and the vibration patterns of subatomic superstrings have been said to resemble harmonic sequences that can be played on a violin. But atoms are more difficult to define when considered in terms of quantum mechanics, and both music and life resist precise definitions as well. Biologists still argue over whether or not some animals’ vocalizations constitute song or mere noise, and even scientists who study the origins of life on Earth have no firm definition of what life itself is. Try it yourself sometime, as I do with students in my introductory biology class at Paul Smith’s College, not far from Saranac Lake.

After the students list a dozen or so features, including eating, respiring, responding to stimuli, and reproducing, I unveil a chainsaw that lay hidden behind the lecture podium. As jaws drop and laughter erupts, I pull the cord and the machine roars to “life.” Nearly every feature on the list is displayed in the consumption of fuel, the exhalation of waste gases, and the raucous responses to my trigger finger. When I “kill” the engine, someone always asks, “Wait, what about reproduction? It can’t be alive if it can’t reproduce.” And as you might guess, a fairly crude reply soon follows, along the lines of “What about a nun, then? Isn’t a nun alive?” or “What about a mule? A mule couldn’t reproduce even if it tried.”

If defining life is this difficult, no wonder we struggle so much to understand how it arises from atoms. But even if we can’t fully explain what life is, the emergence of music from vibrating molecules can help describe what life is like. Consider what might happen if you were to borrow Einstein’s violin, which is still played in concert by his great-grandson Paul, and use it to perform one of his favorite melodies, Mozart’s Sonata in E Minor, on the dock at Knollwood.

Most of the atoms of this particular instrument were also here during the 1940s, because atoms tend to persist in objects such as violins longer than they do in more transient entities such as lakes and musicians. But what exactly is the music that emerges from your fingering and bowing of the strings?

The sounds themselves are short-lived waves of air molecules striking your eardrums, and your perceptions of pitch and tone emerge from waves of neuronal ions that trigger emergent sensory and emotional responses in your brain. The melody itself, however, is a metaphysical pattern that emerges from the process of playing and, ultimately, from a lyrical thought in Mozart’s mind in 1778. The emergent phenomenon of the Sonata in E Minor outlasts any single performance or player, and it exists with or without the instruments that embody it in sound or the scribblings that transcribe it to paper.

Perhaps that is what you are most like, then: not the physical instrument of your atoms but the unique pattern that emerges like music from their interactions, an abstraction that is nonetheless real. Perhaps you are like a living melody that successive orchestras of atoms perform in the theater of your body until, sooner or later, the concert series ends. Walt Whitman suggested as much when he wrote:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Like the sound of a sonata, like Mozart, Einstein, and Whitman, you too will be gone someday. But like the abstract structure of a musical composition, the space-time coordinates and emergent patterns of your life are immortal, and your atomic and subatomic components will continue to exist in many and varied forms for trillions of years until even they must melt into the silence of a dying universe. As Whitman concluded:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

In the meantime, welcome to your atomic self. Hydrogen has become you after billions of years of stellar fusion and countless dances of atoms in air, water, earth, and fire on this planetary vessel of ours. As you finish the rest of the story of your life, may you share your matter and energy ever more wisely and well with the universe.

Now take another breath, if you please, not only because you must but, wonder of wonders, because you can.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_6028198

 

[Joe Mahmood]

LINKIN PARK - LEAVE OUT ALL THE REST

https://youtu.be/yZIummTz9mM


SMART READS: CURT STAGER’S ‘YOUR ATOMIC SELF’

BY: WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL STAFF

You are made of stardust—but how do the elements in that stardust become molded into such a specific shape? In his new book, Your Atomic Self: The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe, ecologist Curt Stager traces the fascinating paths of all the different kinds of elements in our bodies as they enter and exit us. We got a chance to talk with Stager recently about, among other things, how we can truly be individuals if we’re just an assortment of ever-shifting combinations of atoms:

(Note: Interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

World Science Festival: Were you trying to make people feel their connection to the universe with this book?

Curt Stager: Exactly. We’re just flooded by scientific information, but our brains are slower at working it into our personal lives. You may have heard about the great things we’re finding about the universe, about supernovas and solar systems, or on the other side, about tiny subatomic particles. But once you put the book down or turn the TV off, the hard part is realizing that all this is happening right where you live, right before your eyes and within your eyes, and is part of who you are.

We’re not just metaphorically, poetically connected to the Earth; we’re physically connected to it, and to each other.

WSF: Can you give an example of the path an element takes into and out of our bodies?

CS: Let’s take iron: I’m looking at my hand right now, and my skin’s a little pink, because there’s hemoglobin there, with four iron atoms—how’d they get in there? Well, they came in through my food. I can backtrack that from my last meal of chicken; most of the iron we get, unless you’re a vegetarian, is from other animals. You can trace that back through the plants the chicken ate. Plants use iron in their cells for various things like trapping sunlight. And they get the iron through their roots from the crumbling minerals in the soil.

Eventually that path comes to certain kinds of rocks and minerals in the area—I’m in the Adirondacks, so I can see all sorts of peaks and mountains that are eroding and sending little pieces of themselves into the dirt. That can be traced back to the beginning of the solar system, and that can be traced back to an exploding star. When you see a meteor flashing by, that might be dropping little iron atoms that fall to the ground and end up in your body too.

Then you start getting into even more amazing things. When that meteor comes by, you might think, ‘gosh it’s from distant space!’ but it’s probably from the same star that the iron in your dirt and in your hand came from; it’s just that we were spread out in space so far that it’s only now had a chance to bump into our atmosphere. We’re sort of having a family reunion after 4.5 billion years.

WSF: So is there any truth to those old saws you hear as a kid; stuff like, “you’re drinking George Washington’s bath water”?

CS: Yeah, I heard that as a kid too. It’s partly true and partly not. The atoms you’re consuming would certainly have been recycled. But the atoms stick together in different combinations—molecules—and the molecules actually aren’t that stable. A lot of the molecules in things we eat or drink are actually quite young. A lot of the water molecules in our bodies were not around when the dinosaurs were around. The atoms that make them up were, but the combinations of these flecks of matter can be as young as your last breath.

WSF: After I die, what is the fate of the different elements of my body?

CS: Well, you’re dispersing right now—you’re exhaling yourself. The carbon and moisture in your breath was part of your body seconds ago. You’re dropping hairs, skin flakes. You’ve been dissipating since you were born.

But say you’re cremated. You’ll start to heat up, and all your atoms will start jiggling, and the first thing to go off is gonna be your body water, and that’s about 2/3 of you. That’ll go into the air, and within a few days it’ll turn into clouds and raindrops and snow, and it’ll drop to the earth or into the oceans and become part of water bodies or be soaked up by plants. People will eventually drink you and make you part of their bodies.

The next things to go are your carbon atoms. They start breaking apart from your hair and tissues, and oxygen molecules in the air will sweep in like little angels, in pairs, and scoop up a little carbon atom and go off into the air up the chimney. Within a couple of weeks you’ll have circled the entire planet. And within two months you’ll be equally spread throughout the hemisphere you were cremated in; within a year, the entire planet. You’ll become air, which is mostly what you are. There’ll be some dust left on the bottom of the crematorium, mostly minerals, and that’ll be scattered somewhere, and be taken up by plants and algae.

Literally, if you are cremated and your survivors hang around for two or three weeks, they can look up and say that some of your nitrogen atoms are helping make the sky blue.

WSF: Wait, how does my nitrogen make the sky blue?

CS: The sky is not exactly as blue as we think. If you analyze the light coming to us, the blue is just a small fraction of it; it’s just that we see it better than the other colors. There’s actually a lot of violet up there.

Light is an energy that vibrates, and different colors have different vibrations. Atoms are small enough to actually jiggle when a little parcel of light smacks into them; and the molecules in the air—which is mostly nitrogen—vibrate very much like the blue and violet vibrations when they get hit. They do other colors, but mostly the blue and the violet. So part of the blueness of the sky is of our own creation.

WSF: It seems like all of this cycle is confined to the Earth… are our atomic selves trapped here?

CS: Not necessarily! Atmosphere molecules and atoms are being blasted off the top of the atmosphere by the solar wind. So some of our atoms that become gases can work their way up and be sandblasted off into space. We may be on our way to other galaxies by now.

WSF: What can we actually call an individual if we are constantly eroding and rebuilding and we’re made of the same stuff as other organisms?

CS: That is the nub of why this is amazing. It makes you wonder: Who the heck am I? My atoms are coming and going all the time! How can I be made of these little dead flecks of matter and have a personality, and a life, and a death?

There is a concept that sort of describes what it’s like, called emergence, which is that you can start with certain components, and combine them, and they’re more than the sum of their parts. Like, if you’ve got these random vibrations of air, you can arrange them in a certain way and they’re musical notes. Arrange those in a certain way and you have a symphony. Maybe that’s what I am. I am some atomic flecks that come into combinations, briefly, and I’m the melody that they’re playing.

Check out an excerpt from ‘Your Atomic Self’ on the water cycle in our bodies:

When you take a sip of water it doesn’t just slake your thirst. It literally becomes you. The water that runs down your gullet will, within minutes and without processing of any kind, become some of the dominant fluid in your veins and your flesh. Most of your blood is simply tap water with cells, salts, and organic molecules floating in it. Some of the rubbery squishiness of your earlobe poured out of a bottle or a can just a short time ago. And much of the moisture in your eyes only recently fell from rainclouds.

Your mouth is the portal through which water normally enters your body, but you are quite a leaky vessel. A hydrogen isotope study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that the sedentary men under examination consumed and lost about seven pints of body water per day, with four pints leaving through urine and two or three pints through sweat and breath moisture. Vigorous exercise can boost non-urine water losses to one or two pints per hour.

Now let’s see what logic can do with those facts. Nearly two-thirds of your weight comes from water, and your body is an eddy in a stream of that common fluid. Surely the liquid that you slurp from a fountain is not alive, and you don’t consider it murder to stomp on a puddle of water. Therefore most of you is not alive at all, nor is it even permanent or unique enough to merit a personal name.

https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2014/10/smart-reads-curt-stagers-atomic-self/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

GOO GOO DOLLS - IRIS

https://youtu.be/NdYWuo9OFAw


Dr. Dan Siegel on the “Optical Delusion” Keeping Us from Understanding the Human Mind

“When you look at what the mind is, it might be something more than just brain activity.”

By Editors Nov 14, 2016

Dr. Dan Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. The author of multiple bestselling books on mindfulness, development, and neurobiology, Dr. Siegel joined Heleo’s Mandy Godwin on Facebook Live to discuss the mysteries of the human mind.

Mandy: Your new book, Mind, includes a quote by Albert Einstein, about how our idea of being separate from the rest of the world is an “optical delusion.” How is that?

Dan: Einstein used the word “delusion,” a psychotic belief that’s not consistent with reality. When you look at what the mind is, it might be something more than just brain activity. The interconnections we have make the self that comes from the mind not just a solo product, not just within your head. I think that’s what Einstein was referring to, that there’s something about the human condition that gets us to this false belief that we’re separate.

Mandy: Absolutely. In fact, something that you’ve brought up is that many of our disciplines aren’t even sure what we’re talking about when we refer to “mind.”

Dan: This is the reason I wrote the book, because the word “mind” does not have a definition in my original field, which is psychiatry. It doesn’t have a definition in the field of medicine. It doesn’t even have a definition in the field of psychology.

Mandy: What was the working definition of “mind” that you came up with?

Dan: The “mind” is some aspect of energy and information flow. Flow means change; information is a pattern of energy with symbolic value. Energy is this movement from possibility to actuality through a series of probabilities.

Mind, in the subjective experience of it, consciousness and information processing, can be some emergent property of energy and information flow.

Mandy: And where is our mind exactly?

Dan: Yes, people often say, “Well, my mind is (pointing to the head). But where is it?” A lot of people turn to what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, which has been affirmed by scientists—it’s the common view: “mind is what brain does.” That puts the mind only in your head.

Of course the brain affects mental life, your feelings, your thoughts, your consciousness, memory, meaning, beliefs, attitudes, for sure, but is it limited to your skull? This is the issue.

Mandy: You mean, it’s not exclusively neural, it’s also social and interactive. So if it’s not just in your head, just in your skull, then where can you find the mind?

Dan: You would find it throughout your whole body. Right now, your heart is influencing energy and information flow within your skin-encased body. It’s happening in your intestines. We know the bacteria that you ate this morning that you have in your intestines are going to affect the way you feel and think. Your intestines and your heart are a fundamental part of energy and information flow within your experience.

Right now, between me and you, we have energy and information flowing. Someone watching us could say, “Oh yeah, Mandy and Dan are talking. When Dan coughs, he keeps on putting his hand up [on the microphone],” because I have the mind of you and the mind of other people who are going to hear my coughing, so I cover this up so my coughing isn’t so loud. We have this interconnected mind.

If I were a person who were just thinking my mind came from my brain, I could say, “Well, our social signals influence each other.” What we’re saying here in this question, “Where is the mind?”, is that the mind isn’t just influenced by other people—which is classic to social neuroscience—the mind emerges in the between-ness. There’s something happening right here, in the pattern of the way you’re responding to me. Studies show if we mirror each other, we’re going to secrete more oxytocin. We’re going to have a more compatible way of talking to each other than if I started doing stuff that showed I wasn’t resonating with you.

That’s a between-ness. We don’t become each other. We stay differentiated, but we become linked. That’s the “where,” as much between as within.

Mandy: Most of the time, what we hear about in studies is the mind as brain activity, in the field of neuroscience. We don’t hear much of that linkage outside. It seems novel in many ways.

Dan: I knew there would be people who would say, “Well, we know mind is just the brain activity, so why don’t you talk more about the brain?” I’ve written books like that, and there are lots of books written like that. Let’s look at the big picture of what the mind is. If you want a book just on brain anatomy, go look at a book on brain anatomy. Let’s talk about the wholeness of the mind.

Mandy: You pose the question “when is the mind?” How does the concept of time apply to the mind?

Dan: You need to look into the science of time. Researching and writing this book helped illuminate something I had been feeling, but couldn’t really articulate, since I was about 11 years old. Sometimes in my mental life, I would have a feeling of, “Okay, time is passing, time is flowing, there’s not enough time, oh my God, things come and go.” At other times, I’d feel this timeless quality. Did you ever have that experience?

Mandy: Absolutely, especially when you’re really in the middle of something very engaging. There have been times where it seems as though a whole day can pass and you don’t even know, you’re immersed.

Dan: Exactly, and other times you go, “Oh my God, I wish this would last forever.” Time is not something that flows like water in a river. Time as something that flows—we don’t have evidence for that. There is something called the arrow of time, which could be renamed the directionality of change. If you and I had an egg and cracked it open here, we couldn’t un-crack the egg. There’s a directionality of change. It’s now splayed all over the table. You can’t un-crack it.

It turns out that there isn’t something called time flowing, there’s just change happening. What we call “time” may actually really be our awareness of change. There are macro-states that have this directionality of change, but there are micro-states that have no arrow of time, no directionality.

The answer to the “when” of mind is that macro-state energy and information flow patterns, like a thought, have a directionality—they come and they go. In a practice called “the wheel of awareness,” I think you can drop into a micro-state condition where consciousness arises and has no directionality of change. It is “timeless.” Some states of pure consciousness, which you can get at when you’re in the flow of things or when you do reflective practice, can enter this timeless state.

Mandy: You’ve talked about meditative practice, and how that might lead to more awareness.

Dan: Yes, you can open your awareness to all sorts of things. This is the issue of the immersion of the book. I wanted the book to be an experience, not just a download of information, to be relational as writing, to ask these questions rather than just give final answers, and to let the questioning connect the reader to their own inner experience, as well as to me, as we go on the journey together. Also to say, “Look, these questions can open up your own experience of your mind.”

The “why” of mind was, emotionally, the most challenging to write, because it’s a little audacious. It’s really a question: “Is there a why of mind?” For me, when I say the mind is a self-organizing emergent embodied and relational process, then the “why” of self-organization has an answer, and it’s integration.

Integration is where you take different parts and link them to create more well-being. Relationally, what it means is you create more kindness and compassion toward others, and even toward yourself. Another outcome is curiosity and creativity, and openness to life as it unfolds.

Mandy: That’s very hopeful. There’s a really interesting anecdote where you bring in this concept of feelings not having a scientific basis. That struck me—science doesn’t want to encounter feelings. One thing that your project has been taking on is that integration of the emotional life and the neural life.

Dan: I think the way to begin is to honor that science wants and needs to carefully observe things. Usually, it wants to measure things with numbers, to do statistical analyses, and that’s fine. But what if the entity that we want to explore is something called subjective experience? Which would include emotions, but it also includes thoughts, perceptions, memories, beliefs, hopes, dreams, longings, attitudes, desires. That’s all the stuff of the mind. We put that under the phrase “subjective experience,” meaning you cannot really objectively measure it, or even observe it.

You and I see red, right? Even if we put 18 different options of red and we both pick the same one of the 18, I have no idea if the way you see red and the way I see red is the same. Poetry and art evoke subjective experiences. Even if I took a photograph, I have no idea if the feeling it evoked in me will be the feeling it evokes in you. You will have a subjective experience, and honoring that is important.

From a scientific point of view, it’s important to recognize that you can’t outwardly observe subjective experience. The other thing is that, if we have teachings from our parents, from our schools, from society, that the self is a solo job that comes from your head, and that the mind is just brain activity, then what you say is, “Who you are is just your body.”

The sad outcome of that teaching is that you’re alone in this life. People feel so isolated because they see the “me” as separate. Then of course all you want to do is accumulate more stuff for “me,” get more for “me,” it’s about “me.” There’s not much in that that’s going to produce happiness or any positive outcome for the planet. What I talk about is an integrated identity, honoring that you have a “me” in the body, you get about 100 years to live in that body, awesome. Take care of the body well, exercise the body, feed the body, great. No one is saying the body isn’t important.

We’re also saying that differentiating the “me” within the body needs to be balanced with differentiating the “we” that is so under-recognized. That “we” identity needs to be talked about in homes and in classrooms and in the media. What’s been so exciting about it is people feel this opening up to a more authentic and real way of imagining where is your mind, who you are, why you’re here, what you can do with your life. You only get about 100 years in the body, but if you realize you are much more than your body, you’ve just achieved connection to people and living beings that were before you, and will be afterwards. You get this very different sense of vitality and meaning and purpose to life.

Unfortunately, in modern society, we’ve been living this very isolationist life. It’s a partial truth. To return to Einstein’s words, it’s an “optical delusion,” a psychotic belief. To be bold about it, it’s a lie that may be lethal. The more we believe that lie, the more we treat the planet like a trashcan, and there’s not much hope for the future.

Part of why I wrote the book was to open the conversation up with questions that can become a win-win-win situation. You get closer to the truth in yourself, that’s one win. You feel how you can develop well-being in your relationships with others, that’s the second win. The third win is that the planet is waiting for this transformation of our understanding of who we are and what to do with our lives collectively on Earth.

https://www.nextbigideaclub.com/con...g-us-from-understanding-the-human-mind/20510/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

ATHLETE - WIRES




Your Mind Isn’t Confined to the Inside of Your Skull

Where is your mind? Professor Daniel Siegel answers this question with a more revolutionary one: Where isn't your mind?

Daniel Siegel: One aspect of the mind, beyond subjective experience, consciousness, maybe even information processing, these are facets of the mind that are good descriptions, let's just put those to the side for now. This fourth facet of the mind has a definition, not just a description. This facet of the mind can be defined this way: the emergent self-organizing embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. And if we take that apart step-by-step we can see that the system we're talking about is called a complex system, that means it's open to influences from outside of itself, it's capable of being chaotic and it's non-linear meaning small inputs have large and difficult to predict results. When you have those three characteristics math says that system is a complex system. And once we're in the realm of complex systems we find that these complex systems have what are called emergent properties, the interaction of the elements of the system give rise to these properties that cannot be reduced to the singular elements that are interactions give rise to them.

The notion that complex systems have emergent properties is sometimes responded to by various scientists or even the general public as very confusing, sometimes even ridiculous. What I do in the book Mind is I actually put some quotes from some scientists who actually see emergence as not only a scientific property of complex systems but as a necessary way of understanding what it is that emergence, for example, why clouds have the beautiful ways that they unfold across the sky. That's an emergent property of water molecules and air molecules that form of the clouds and the emergent property there is self-organization that's determining how it unfolds. So when you come to the emergent property of self-organization then you also get people saying well that just doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel intuitive and I totally share that initial response. Self-organization has a strange reality where number one, as an emergent property it's the interaction of the elements of the system, in this case energy and information flow that is giving rise to it that's what an emergent property means. It can't be reduced to the singular elements. But as a self-organizing emergent property it means it's arising from something, that's the emergent part, but then it's turning back and regulating that from which it is arising, which is completely non-intuitive. That's called a recursive feature. Recursive means it has a feedback loop, it a feedback system, it feeds back on itself. So even there as I'm speaking to you I'm doing an assessment of what's going on I say feedbacks, no it's feeds back. So, what that means is that arising from the system is self-organization, it then regulates the interaction of the elements of the system so that self-organization is then continuingly influencing itself, which is completely the counter intuitive.

So here's the amazing thing, it's a proven property of our universe that complex systems have this recursive property to it. It's probably why people have not really gone to these emergent properties because especially self-organization it's not intuitive. The second reason I think people haven't gone here is because this definition of the mind as the emergent self-organizing embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy information is placing the mind in "two places at once", within your body and between you and other people and you and the planet. So this irritates people because first of all many people point to their head when they talk about their mind and they place the mind inside the skull. Fine. But even if you kept the mind only inside the skin encased body you'd feel okay with the word embodied and many people do.

However, once you say it's both embodied and relational you get into this really interesting new way of thinking because you say how could one thing, mind, be both within and between in two places? Well, here's a way to think about it: our fundamental element we're proposing is energy and information flow. Now, if you think about that the skull nor the skin are impermeable boundaries for energy and information to flow. So you may think of them as two places but it's one system, energy and information flow, and it's happening in many different locations.

https://bigthink.com/amp/daniel-siegel-on-emergent-minds-2604504661


DAN SIEGEL - A SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF THE HUMAN MIND

 

[Joe Mahmood]

HOLLOW COVES - WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

 

[Joe Mahmood]

PROFESSOR GREEN FT. EMELI SANDE - READ ALL ABOUT IT




‘Minds have always been outside themselves’: Raymond Tallis on extended cognition

In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, the UK philosopher, writer and retired neuroscientist Raymond Tallis offers his nuanced view of the extended mind thesis, proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998. Their paper ‘The Extended Mind’ shifted the bedrock of modern philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and eventually became the most cited philosophy paper of the decade. Its thesis was that our consciousnesses are constantly integrating and being moulded by outside objects, including other people, in ways that suggest that the mind extends far beyond the confines of the skull, or even the skin. Somewhat controversial upon its publication, the paper’s central idea gained greater popular traction as innovations in technologies such as medical implants and smart devices seemed to narrow the gap between human cognition and external objects. Two decades on from the paper’s publication, Tallis finds much to admire and to critique in its central contention, embracing the notion that our minds are in no way constrained to the brain, while rejecting the idea that devices such as smartphones open up novel pathways for understanding consciousness.

Video by Closer to Truth

https://aeon.co/videos/minds-have-a...emselves-raymond-tallis-on-extended-cognition


RAYMOND TALLIS - VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY

 

[Joe Mahmood]

SKILLET - STARS



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18th December 2020

Japanese capsule with asteroid samples lands in Australia after space trip of over 5 billion kilometres

Agence France-Presse
Published: 4:14am, 6 Dec, 2020

* Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) officials say the ‘box of treasures’ landed in perfect form in Woomera, Australia

* The capsule contains collected material that is 4.6 billion years old, that is from the earliest times of the solar system

Japanese space agency officials on Sunday hailed the arrival of rare asteroid samples on Earth after they were collected by space probe Hayabusa-2 during an unprecedented mission. In a streak of light across the night sky, a capsule containing the precious specimens taken from a distant asteroid arrived on Earth after being dropped off by the probe.

Scientists hope the samples, which are expected to amount to no more than 0.1 grams of material, could help shed light on the origin of life and the formation of the universe. “After six years of space travel, the box of treasures was able to land in Australia’s Woomera this morning,” Databus-2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda told a press conference.

The capsule carrying samples entered the atmosphere just before 2.30am Japan time (17:30 GMT Saturday), creating a shooting-star-like fireball as it entered Earth’s atmosphere en route to the landing site. A few hours later, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) confirmed the samples had been recovered, with help from beacons emitted by the capsule as it plummeted to Earth after separating from Hayabusa-2 on Saturday, while the fridge-sized probe was about 220,000km (137,000 miles) away.

“The capsule landed in perfect form, and the probe is moving on to another mission,” Tsuda said.

The capsule, recovered in the southern Australian desert, will now be in the hands of scientists performing initial analysis including checking for any gas emissions. It will then be sent to Japan. Megan Clark, chief of the Australian Space Agency, congratulated the “wonderful achievement”. “2020 has been a difficult year all around the world” but the Hayabusa-2 helped “renew our faith in the world, and our trust [in] and appreciation” of the science of the outer universe, she said.

The samples were collected by Hayabusa-2, which launched in 2014, from the asteroid Ryugu, about 300 million kilometres from Earth. The probe collected both surface dust and pristine material from below the surface that was stirred up by firing an “impactor” into the asteroid. The material is believed to be unchanged since the time the universe was formed. Larger celestial bodies like Earth went through radical changes including heating and solidifying, changing the composition of the materials on their surface and below.

But “when it comes to smaller planets or smaller asteroids, these substances were not melted, and therefore it is believed that substances from 4.6 billion years ago are still there,” Hayabusa-2 mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa told reporters before the capsule arrived. Scientists are especially keen to discover whether the samples contain organic matter, which could have helped seed life on Earth.

“We still don’t know the origin of life on Earth and through this Hayabusa-2 mission, if we are able to study and understand these organic materials from Ryugu, it could be that these organic materials were the source of life on Earth,” Yoshikawa said.

“We’ve never had materials like this before … water and organic matters will be subject to research, so this is a very valuable opportunity,” said Motoo Ito, senior researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

Half of Hayabusa-2’s samples will be shared between Jaxa, US space agency Nasa and other international organisations, and the rest kept for future study as advances are made in analytic technology.

The work is not over for Hayabusa-2, which will now begin an extended mission targeting two new asteroids. It will complete a series of orbits around the sun for around six years before approaching the first of the asteroids – named 2001 CC21 – in July 2026.

The probe will not get as close as it did to Ryugu, but scientists hope it will be able to photograph CC21 and that the fly-by will help develop knowledge about how to protect Earth against asteroid impact.

Hayabusa-2 will then head towards its main target, 1998 KY26, a ball-shaped asteroid with a diameter of just 30 metres.

When the probe arrives at the asteroid in July 2031, it will be around 300 million kilometres from Earth. It will observe and photograph the asteroid, no easy task given that it is spinning rapidly, rotating on its axis about every 10 minutes. But Hayabusa-2 is unlikely to land and collect samples, as it probably would not have enough fuel to return them to Earth.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/asia/arti...rth-bringing-eagerly-awaited-asteroid-samples

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18th December 2020

Japan scientists left ‘speechless’ by samples from asteroid 300 million km away

Agence France-Presse
Published: 5:05pm, 15 Dec, 2020

* Samples from the Ryugu asteroid were dropped from space into the Australian desert by the Hayabusa-2 space probe earlier this month

* Researchers hope the material will shed light on the formation of the universe and perhaps offer clues about how life began on Earth

Scientists in Japan said on Tuesday they were left “speechless” when they saw how much asteroid dust was inside a capsule delivered by the Hayabusa-2 space probe in an unprecedented mission. The Japanese probe collected surface dust and pristine material last year from the asteroid Ryugu, around 300 million kilometres (200 million miles) away, during two daring phases of its six-year mission. This month it dropped off a capsule containing the samples, which created a fireball as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, and landed in the Australian desert before being transported to Japan.

Scientists at the Japanese space agency JAXA on Tuesday removed the screws to the capsule’s inner container, having already found a small amount of asteroid dust in the outer shell. “When we actually opened it, I was speechless. It was more than we expected and there was so much that I was truly impressed,” said JAXA scientist Hirotaka Sawada.

“It wasn’t fine particles like powder, but there were plenty of samples that measured several millimetres across.”

Researchers hope the material will shed light on the formation of the universe and perhaps offer clues about how life began on Earth. The scientists have not yet revealed if the material inside is equal to, or perhaps even more, than the 0.1 grams they had said they hoped to discover.

Seiichiro Watanabe, a Hayabusa project scientist and professor at Nagoya University, said he was nonetheless thrilled.

“There are a lot [of samples] and it seems they contain plenty of organic matter,” he said.

“So I hope we can find out many things about how organic substances have developed on the parent body of Ryugu.” Half of Hayabusa-2’s samples will be shared between JAXA, US space agency Nasa and other international organisations.

The rest will be kept for future study as advances are made in analytic technology.

But work is not over for the probe, which will now begin an extended mission targeting two new asteroids.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/asia/east...-left-speechless-samples-asteroid-300-million

 

[Joe Mahmood]

KEANE - SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW

 

[Joe Mahmood]

TINIE TEMPAH FT. ERIC TURNER - WRITTEN IN THE STARS