Updates and Re-Takes On Some Old Posts: Toxo, Hot Peppers and Boredom

A. Toxoplasmosis 
I had written a bit on Toxoplasmosis gondii  HERE. This is a weird microbe that infects around 11% of Unistatians and other countries have a much higher infection rate. If infected by this parasite, most people's immune systems keep it in check; for others it appears to get into the brain, cause cysts there (Ew!), and very weird stuff: it makes women more aggressive; men become more impulsive and less fearful when they probably should be cautious. One way we get it is via contact with domesticated cat feces. It rarely kills anyone; it simply makes them act strangely.

Right after I wrote about it, another study came out. (Secondhand HERE.) Its lead author, E.Fuller Torrey, thinks cats should be seen as more dangerous than most of us think they are. Having a cat around in your childhood might lead to schizophrenia or other mental illness in adulthood, their study suggests.

Sidelight: Interestingly to sombunall readers of this blog, Dr. Torrey published a book on Ezra Pound in 1984; I've read it: Torrey thinks Pound and his pals in high places got away with pulling a fast one on the Unistat gummint: Pound was found, basically, insane for broadcasting his at-times vile antisemitic thoughts over the radio with Mussolini's imprimatur, and therefore Pound avoided a death sentence for treason.

Adding to this bizarre infection, a study in France sought to understand the possible evolutionary aspect of Toxo. Some chimps were infected with it, and urine from a leopard didn't scare them away like it should have. Today, mice and rats infected with Toxo aren't afraid of domesticated cats like they ought to be, for their own survival. I also learned that lions and tigers are not predators of chimps, but leopards are. I will never become a zoologist at this point...

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky is fascinated by the Toxo research, while his equally brilliant colleague at Stanford's rival, U. of California at Berkeley, Michael B. Eisen, said this study is interesting, but the chimps' sense of smell could be set off by factors other than their Toxo infection.

So: Toxo may have jumped from being incubated in the guts of a Big Cat, to domesticated cats circa 15,000 years ago. But I don't see the evolutionary Big Picture of Toxo, other than it's doing what it's got to do to keep going generation after generation, like viruses. It makes some of us act really weird, and humans in our pre-history who ended up being eaten by big cats? They're not any of our ancestors. I'd like to hear an Intelligent Design person explain this one.

B. On Hot Peppers
Three and a half years ago I blogged about, among other things, my love for very hot peppers, and how I might have hallucinated in a Thai restaurant near Berkeley due to an extreme hot pepper event. I still chase after the buzz, and the quest to develop the hottest peppers in the world continues unabated.

Recently I ran across a fascinating article by a Berkeley writer (who I only know by name), Andrew Leonard. "Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food: How the Chili Pepper Got To China."

Now, I consider Nautilus one of the best online magazines, but the comments for this article were, I thought, really horrid. So many fine points made by Leonard missed! (Also: Leonard invites semantic reaction by asserting that "revolutionaries" like really hot peppers, when he really only makes a strong case for those Chinese coming out of Sichuan Province.) Was George Washington a lover of hot peppers? Doing the research: no. Karl Marx? Probably not. Che? He appears to have liked spicy food, but he didn't make a huge deal out of it. One of the highlights of Leonard's piece is the story of how former German schoolteacher Otto Braun, turned Soviet counter-espionage agent, was sent to advise Mao, and couldn't get used to the very spicy food, and Mao is quoted, "The food of the true revolutionary is red pepper."

U. of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin had long been interested in why some people really love hot, spicy foods and peppers. Why do peppers seem "hot" when they aren't? Because capsaicin activates pain receptors (called TRPV1) for actual hot things. It's a delightful glitch, methinks. Rozin thought people attracted to hot peppers and who enjoy the taste and the pain must be the same sorts of people who are thrill-seekers, chance-takers...maybe even revolutionaries? Mao thought the pepper-lover is ready to fight and win; Rozin later coined the term "benign masochism" for pepper-lovers.

(So who are the malignant masochists? Poor Trump supporters?)

Decades after Rozin's guesses about hot pepper-lovers, research has validated his ideas. A Penn.State study showed a significant correlation between "sensation seeking" and love for hot peppers. (Italics mine to remind you it's tentative.)

Leonard goes into the history of Sichuan Province: where, about 250 years after Columbus, hot peppers made their way and grew easily and cheaply and preserved themselves for long periods and added flavor to dishes, vitamins B and C, and were antibacterial to boot.

The history of Sichuan and its de-population in the 16th century due to banditry, famine and rebellions, followed by an influx of 1.7 million the next century (fall of the Ming, rise of the Qing) is one Leonard tries to tie with the hot and humid province, the ying/yang medicinal philosophy, the cheapness of raising hot peppers there, and risk-taking personalities on the move due to internal strife. Because these hardy souls lived through tough times and migrated to Sichuan from other parts of China, the idea is that revolutionary personalities are prevalent there. And hey, I dig a spicy-food-loving lady too. But the neurobiological research so far shows that these pepper-lovers may just be more thrill-seeking; I think political revolutionary is a mere sub-type. Still, read the article, 'cuz it's pretty good if you're into that sorta thing.

It seems people are probably not born with a penchant for spicy hot peppers, and need to become habituated. I think I habituated myself, and it could be because I'm what Linda Bartoshuk calls a "nontaster": the number of fungiform papillae on my tongue make me like my coffee black and strong, my beer very hoppy and bitter, my peppers really hot, etc. However, I have never considered myself a thrill-seeker in the ordinary sense of the term. I do seek novelty...

C. On Boredom
I assayed some aspects - mostly my subjectivity - toward boredom HERE. With the availability heuristic - or is it more like "priming"? - once I've written on some topic, that topic suddenly appears everywhere.

A book called Unbored came to my attention. Although it's for younger people, I saw a lot of my own thinking on the topic reflected there. In delving into Robert Anton Wilson's Sex, Drugs and Magick, looking for a reference about something else, I happened to re-read a part of RAW's discussion of Aleister Crowley's book Diary of a Drug Fiend:

In the third, and most controversial part of the book, "Purgatorio", Peter and Lou attempt a cure under the auspices of a mysterious magician named King Lamus - a thinly disguised portrait of Crowley himself. At the Abbey of Thelema (based on an actual religious retreat once run by Crowley in Sicily), Peter and Lou are put in a situation where all the cocaine and heroin they could possibly want is immediately and easily available to them. King Lamus tells them, using Crowley's favorite slogan, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

There is a gimmick, of course. In fact, there are several gimmicks. The abbey, although hardly as austere as a Christian monastery, is quite isolated from civilization; Peter and Lou are soon confronted with the most underrated but powerful force in the world - boredom. There are no movies, nightclubs, or other distractions. When they complain, King Lamus tells them again, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." They soon discover that, in spite of their hedonistic existence, they have never actually done their "will" in a profound sense, but have only followed momentary whims. Isolated at the abbey, they are forced to ask themselves, again and again, what they truly do "will" for their subsequent lives.
-p.186

Take a few moments to ponder this?

Boredom is being tackled by neuroscientists: if you've ever been tackled by a neuroscientist, you know what I mean. But I jest. Scientist Bill Greisar says of boredom that it's so pervasive it "suggests it serves some critical role in behavior." Which I think Crowley - a more interesting psychologist to my eyes - saw in the early part of the century. In one of many articles on boredom studies, Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage comes up, as does Dickens, and the idea of one thinker that boredom is a milder form of disgust, which took me some time to "see." (Right now, I've gone back to not "seeing" much of a relationship between Boredom and Disgust, and I'm afraid it simply was never meant to be. I'd like to fix up Boredom with Anger...)

Many studies have shown that boring activities lead to more creativity, even boring reading activities. ("In some circumstances" was the caveat from one researcher.)

In a creative activity bored subjects performed better than distressed, elated and relaxed subjects. (I wonder how they provoked elation?) The physiology of boredom is interesting: you're more stressed (cortisol in bloodstream), with an increased heart rate, unmotivated by your surroundings, and have a difficult time sustaining attention.

What could be the purpose of boredom? A Texas A&M study suggests boredom is something like hunger or thirst: it motivates you to change your immediate circumstances. You seek novelty, new goals and situations. "By motivating desire for change from the current state, boredom increases opportunities to attain social, cognitive, emotional and experiential stimulation that could have been missed." Anticipation of a change in mental state is associated with our old pal Dopamine.

Philosopher Andreas Elpidorou says boredom is essential for a decent life and life without it would be a nightmare.

Around the same time, I stumbled upon the idea that, how can we still be bored in the 21st century? The idea is that too much stimulation is boring.

Since my initial blog on boredom, I've become convinced that I do get bored. It's probably not true of my assertion that I'm never bored. It's a matter of degree, which reduces to the felt amount of time bored, which for me isn't much. Id est: my moments of boredom are so brief, I don't frame them as "me being bored." I simply move on to the next thing. And there are endlessly interesting things of easy avail to me. Perhaps I'm some sort of intelligent simpleton?

I consider my lifetime love of reading here paramount. How many departures from my paramount "reality" are available to me in books? It's endless. It's good for a reliable squirt of dopamine into my brain-pan.

Not long ago I read a wonderful novella by Anton Chekhov, The Story of a Nobody, from around 1893. The description of the main male antagonist's friend, a logical man named Pekarasky, who can multiply two three-digit numbers in his head immediately, has railway and finance tables memorized, can convert currencies mentally and accurately:

But for this extraordinary intelligence many things that even a stupid man knows were quite incomprehensible. Thus he could not understand at all why it is that people get bored, cry, shoot themselves and even kill others, why they worry about things and events that do not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Saltykov-Schedrin. 
-p.11

Is this not a creepy guy, this Pekarsky? Doesn't something about him seem vaguely monstrous to you?

Walker Pearcy's theory of hurricanes seems to fit in here nicely. Malaise and despair and world-weariness can be fixed by a you-must-act-now situation, which is the hurricane. My view is that we need to pay attention and develop a mental "patch" so that it doesn't require a hurricane or car accident in order to make our interiorities vital again.

                                           kunst: Mr. Bob Campbell

William S. Burroughs at 99: Viruses, Memes, Cats, Art, ETC

On Feb 5, WSB would've been 99. What follows is a hodgepodge of Burroughsianiac musings.

For virtually all of his life, WSB was at odds with the trans-societal forces he eventually labeled Control. (On the Wiki page for WSB it says he was turned down by the OSS, and IIRC that was in Morgan's bio, but I digress already.) I've always found it interesting that Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud who used Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses in the new "science" of Public Relations, had as an early competitor Ivy Lee, who was WSB's uncle via marriage. Lee was the epitome of Control, and just before he died of a brain tumor at age 57 in 1934, Congress had begun investigating Lee's ties to the Nazis and IG Farben.

In Ezra Pound's Canto 74, he mentions the stark fact that the Allies bombed the hell out of Germany, but somehow they missed the Farben plant.

WSB, the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs adding machine corporation, was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school and college prep for rich kids that was influenced by the Boy Scout code, around 1930. He hated it. Later the US government bought the school and all the surrounding land, for the secretive Manhattan Project. Gore Vidal had also gone to Los Alamos Ranch, and in his autobiography Palimpsest he compared WSB to Pound (p.228) WSB was influenced by Pound (and Joyce). The NY artist/critic Richard Kostelanetz asserted that Pound's The Cantos was the last great poetry collage, while WSB's Naked Lunch was the last great prose collage. (Kostelanetz: ABC of Contemporary Reading, p.53)

Pound and WSB were very much in love with cats. See these photos of writers and their cats. If you know much about these writers - they were all (perhaps?) "weirder" than the average weird great writer. I wonder if it had anything to do with toxoplasmosis, or tiny organisms that get into the brain, which originate in cats?  (They are actually protozoa, these cat-carrying microbes...)

Pound was found "insane" by the US for his very poor use of First Amendment ideas on behalf of Mussolini and "the US Constitution" and other things.

If this had anything to do with explaining the avant aspects of WSB and his art, it seems almost too ironic, as he, under the influence of a course of study with Korzybski, developed the idea that language was a virus that had commandeered humanity's minds; we are language's "host."

[The great Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky on toxoplasmosis. Some of you hardcore Pound and Burroughs exegetes might want to invest 25 minutes of your time to listen to this guy, keeping in mind those writers' love for cats. Has anyone else pointed this out? I wonder if toxo can make someone sort of "half-schizo," where they are really weird, but creative, and not bothered by auditory hallucinations and the complete consort of the full-blown paranoid schizophrenic? Pound went around Rapallo feeding the feral cats despite not having any money; WSB was horrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation because it would mean his cats would die. If there's something to it, then maybe we can venture that a protozoa has had a huge influence on Literary Modernism. OR: the OG is a cat lover: maybe I'm toxo-infected and what it does is give you grandiose ideas about unforeseen connections?]

This reminds me of an essay called "The Aliens Are Among Us," by Nathan Wolfe, who founded the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. He's talking about viruses: "Viruses operate along a continuum with their hosts and other organisms they interact with: some harm their hosts, some benefit their hosts, and some - perhaps most - live in relative neutrality with them, neither substantively harming nor benefiting the organisms they must at least temporarily inhabit for their own survival." (p.191 of What's Next: Dispatches From the Future of Science)

The Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris said that Burroughs himself was like a cultural virus: "Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a 'meme.' : 'a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically 'alive.' If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive parasitic self-replication. The viral programme 'simply says' "Copy me and spread me around." This is Burroughs: 'all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.'" (from Harris's essay, "Can You See A Virus?: The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs")

Speaking of viruses from space, language as virus, cats infecting human brains, and memes: Scientology has been in the news a lot lately. And Burroughs had his fling with it. See here. This is another aspect of WSB that fascinates me.

Still one of the best biographies of WSB is, in my opinion, Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw. Last year Morgan wrote an article about why WSB hated Morgan's book. In Morgan's book he pointed out that, in Naked Lunch WSB seemed to foresee AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic asphyxiation becoming common, the crack epidemic. I'd add that WSB seemed, very early on, around 1961,  to suspect the CIA would be behind LSD flooding the streets of Unistat, and they would be doing it in an effort to staunch a youth rebellion.

I think WSB also foretold Kenneth Starr sexual fascism, but maybe that's for another day.

Oh yea: there's a wild little book called The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, by Tom Clark. In it he asserts that the antics of Chogyam Trungpa are like WSB's character "Dr. Benway."

Not long ago I went looking for the origin of a line WSB repeated: "And beside, the wench is dead." It looks like he got it from Christopher Marlowe via TS Eliot. (See Lives of the Poets, Schmidt, p.606)

Robert Anton Wilson: two passages around WSB:

"My friend, novelist William S. Burroughs, liked to say that 'anything which can be accomplished by chemical means can also be accomplished by non-chemical means.' I have personally found this to be true. There is no area of new perception and expanded awareness discoverable by peyote (or LSD or similar drugs) that cannot also be reached by techniques well-known to Oriental yogis and Western occultists. The sensory withdrawal techniques pioneered by Dr. Lilly and the new biofeedback machines also duplicate most of this expanded awareness." -pp.32-33, Sex, Drugs and Magick

From a 1992 interview:
Q: And what are some of your memories of that whole scene at Millbrook at that time?

RAW: Well, I'm sorry to sound like an advocate, but my impression was that Leary was one of the most brilliant people that I've ever met. Very much like my impression when I first met Buckminster Fuller and William Burroughs. The three people who gave me the sensation that I am in the presence of higher intelligence.

Q: And would you elaborate a little bit on why you put William Burroughs in that company? What do you see in Burroughs's writing, or his particular brand of intelligence that put him in that company?

RAW: Well, it's the choice of words. I first read Seventeen Episodes From Naked Lunch in a magazine called Big Table, and I felt no writer since James Joyce was able to put words together so efficiently and effectively to create the exact images and emotional overtones that he wanted. And I began to notice that not only was he a great prose poet, but he had a lot of interesting ideas, too.

Q: Had you also had the familiarity with Alfred Korzybski at that point?

RAW: Yes. That's one thing that Burroughs, Leary, Bucky Fuller and I all have in common - we all have familiarity with Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.
(-from transcript of radio interview for Off The Beaten Path, see near the end. The person that transcribed the interview was quite unfamiliar with names mentioned, so I corrected the gross misspelling of Korzybski's name in the original.)

- In an effort to induce altered states without using drugs, Burroughs, in collaboration with Brion Gysin (the main brain behind the Thing) and Ian Sommerville, they came up with The Dream Machine, which uses flickering light patterns to interact with the eye/brain rhythms. You sit in front of it with your eyes closed and it does things to your brain. See the 2008 documentary by Nik Sheehan. Anyway, here's a brief:

WSB on art and making people aware of what they didn't know that they knew: