An Octad of Items For Your Delectation

Q: Is the OG stoned while writing this post?
is X
is not

Random articles I stumbled upon that interested me, with brief (you hope!) comments. - OG

1. When fire alarms go off, or you're stuck in a burning building, or even in the WTC just after they were hit by planes, many people don't do anything. They second-guess what's going on. They rationalize. Some apparently think they'll do something to get away from danger, but let me finish this phone call first, or oops, let me go back into the burning building to save my photos. They don't want any unknown changes in their lives. This is well-documented. Stephen Grosz, a psychoanalyst, notes clients who come to him with obvious problems. They want to change. The decision to make the change seems like a no-brainer to us, reading this. But they don't want to make any changes. How do we account for this?

Comment: as I read this brief article, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the people who neglected to get out of harm's way, and all I could think of was "Gads, I've seen so many false alarms and I've felt foolish a few times when I overreacted to what purported to be danger signals, I bet this is really not a big deal." But staying in a burning restaurant and burning to death because you thought you should pay the check first? Approach/avoidance cross-signals and Really Bad Outcomes...

2. Sorry for this article's length, but I couldn't stop reading it when I began. New School University cultural critic and PhD in American Studies, Mark Greif, writes one of the best cultural sociological pieces on the role of police in a Constitutional democracy that I've ever read. Tackling the topic due to increased visibility of police violence and numerous cries for reform, Greif notes that the role of police is "impossible," that when they graduate from the academy they swear to uphold the Constitution, though every cop knows this isn't what they do. Indeed, legal and political thought is "above their pay grade." Because a theory for the existence of police is fairly informal, reform will be difficult. Greif ironically mentions the great sociologist of police, Egon Bittner, who wrote that "criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with a frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely," and yet police departments award a Bittner to cops who've stayed on the force for 15 years.

This is an amazing piece, and despite quotes and references from and to Foucault, Adam Smith, Ben Franklin, Erving Goffman, Mary Douglas, Hobbes, Locke and the formidable police ethnographer Peter K. Manning, the piece flows. What hooked me in was the first section, about how police touch you. The varieties of touch. Women can be touched by police in public and the subtlest shift in touch can go from "professional and neutral" to "sexual and humiliating." There's a catalog of touching, and Greif states, "The purpose of touching by police if to make people touchable." And it can go all the way up to being punched and kicked while an arrestee is already on the ground.

Police in ambiguous situations add violence, and Greif argues this is a way to "test" the "good" citizens in the public to see to what degree they will support this violence. A problem is that the police really don't know who the "good" citizens are. Another problem: do you think your neighbors support escalating police violence? How many object, but withhold their voices for fear of retribution by the police? One thing is clear, and Greif points this out: police know black and poor people look wrong in white and rich neighborhoods; they know white and rich people in black and poor neighborhoods look suspect. So they investigate. "This, to their minds, is parity. They don't recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same."

Comment: if you're concerned with police violence, read this.

3. In Russia, a 53 year old former professor who favored poetry stabbed to death his 67 year old friend, who said the only real literature is prose. Both were drunk.

Comment: Who knows what got lost in the translation here, but neither guy had ever read Korzybski, that seems for goddamned sure to me. In other words, in my own evaluations of poetry and prose, both seem like what is commonly called "literature" to me, and both forms can say profound things; at the moment I write this, I consider both forms as complementary, and if I encounter a drunk who gets belligerent and wants to argue that either poetry or prose "is" better than the other, I will very likely leave the presence of such a learned moron.

4. At Stanford's "Cracking The Neural Code Program" they've developed ingenious ways to isolate the circuitry for social behavior in the brain, of mice. Using optogenetics (read the article), when the circuit was buzzed the mouse interacted with a new mouse. (By sniffing. I do this too at parties but have found it necessary to develop stealth methods, know what I mean? Also at parties I frequently search for the cheese, but that's not my social behavior circuit working and merely my mouse-circuit.) By inhibiting the circuit, the mouse doesn't care for mingling at all. Of course dopamine is involved in this new knowledge of social circuitry, and I'm impressed not only by the Stanford people's techniques, but by the fact that they didn't buzz a circuit and note which neurochemicals rose up. That's what most pharmacological research does. This is on a very complex circuit, with branches into the ventral tagmental area and the nucleus accumbens. Just the trick of finding the social circuit(s) seems impressive. Buzz the circuit and put an inanimate object in the environment and the mice don't care: it's a social circuit. These researchers think this knowledge may spin off into helping humans with autism, social anxiety, depression, and maybe even schizophrenia. And let's hope it does help. I just hope these researchers aren't yankin' our chains, or chainettes.

----------------------------------------------

                                I take this to be Mamakind with a vaporizer                

5. Here's a review of Sex Pot: The Marijuana Lover's Guide to Gettin' It On, from 2011. Written by Skunk mag's legendary Mamakind, a bisexual and polyamorous stoner who was so compelling to one reader that he developed her imagined "pussytoke": a way to get stoned through what I visualize as a dildo crossed with a pipe. It is described as gourd-like. Anyway...yes. Pot and sex: one of the alchemist's better-kept open secrets to illumination. I like reading books on pot. I like reading books on sex. I've been known to put a book down, walk nine feet, and have stoned sex. And yet I've only thumbed this baby in public.

Comment: I think I grokked it fully standing in a place that sells tie-dyes and does piercings. In Sebastapol, if I recall correctly.

6. Prof. of Analytical Philosophy at Geneva, Kevin Mulligan, reviewed A.W. Moore's book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. Mulligan likes it. It's about "meta-metaphysics," or trying to make general sense of the metaphysical thought of 20 eminent philosophers, all male, all English, French, or German. And Spinoza. The review was head buzz enough for me. Moore looks at Transcendent things. He tries to tease out the meta-metaphysics of Novelty: can we make sense of things in entirely new ways? Or are we "limited to looking for the sense that things already make?" I think making sense of things in entirely new ways is one of the great joys and jobs of the visionary, but what do I know?

Also scrutinized for its meta-metaphysical aspects: Creativity. Can we make things make sense in a creative way without hauling in wrong vs. right? Wittgenstein is a big deal for Moore. So's Guattari, as you see by Mulligan's remarks.

Very early in my reading of this review, I thought of William James's lecture on pragmatism in which he says (I paraphrase from memory) if you're reading Hegel or Spinoza or any of these Wiggy Thinkers and can't help but think, "What sort of person writes an entire, fat and very learned book on such topics?" And James says you're not wrong to think this. I love that riff. Anyway...

Okay, so there "is" propositional knowledge: of facts and truth. Non-propositional knowledge is what we get from art, or listening to music: we get knowledge, but it's not stated in the Art. And Moore wants his meta-metaphysics to be more like Art than Theory. What a relief! What appears to be the most important role of metaphysics, to Moore, is giving us "radically new concepts by which to live." This strikes me as having a strong family resemblance to Harold Bloom's notion of what the Strong Poet does. I wonder if neologisms qualify as quanta in this instance for Moore?

Comment: I doubt I'll read this book, simply because there's not enough time in my life. A more personal reason: knowledge and "reality" are, in my favorite models - pragmatism, the sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, and the diffuse thought radiating from Robert Anton Wilson's writings - one in the same. Social knowledge is constantly creating "reality" and vice-versa. The various metaphysical issues are ones that function either as artistic objects for contemplation, or as tools for living. While I applaud the attempt (and I may surprise myself and end up reading such a thing as A.W. Moore produced here; stranger things have happened) to hunt for a simpler overview of metaphysics, I really do seem to have a full plate of reading to do already. The plate piles with books into the ionosphere, and Air Traffic Control and the Federal Aviation Administration is constantly on my ass over this.

7. A woman attended a lecture on out-of-body (OBE) experiences at the U. of Ottawa, then told the lecturers that she can do all that voluntarily, and seemed surprised that not everyone does it. They did an MRI on her and found that the visual cortex deactivated, and instead she had "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery." These areas do mental representations of body movement. The woman often did it before sleep. She was aware she was still in her body, but says she could see herself "rotating in the air above her body" and other similar extravaganzas. The woman never told anyone because she thought everyone did it. She should've brought it up at parties! (Or maybe her social circuitry isn't working on all cylinders?)

The cool thing: maybe there are more people who can do this than we thought. Also, it may be learned during a "window" of time during adolescence. I think I've done it in middle-age - maybe 20 minutes ago, in fact - but I had extra-botanical help, so who knows if it counts. Also: because the woman said there was no feeling of "awe" or marvel when she did it, it wasn't classified as a classic OBE, but instead was deemed a mere ECE, or Extra-Corporeal Experience.

Comment: I'm jealous, frankly. Of course I'd want the whole nine in an OBE, but I sense an ECE would still be a kick. (Insert your anal probe joke in this space; go ahead and write on your computer screen right now, but only in crayon using cursive, please: _____________________________.)

8. I'm guessing a lot of you who've stuck it out here have already heard the one about the two Kazakhstan scientists who have looked at the human genetic code and think they have detected the hazy signals that our designers stamped their designer label into our genes, if we can only decipher it. Oh, they're onto it. If you play with models of the genetic code you see all sorts of cool things, like the use of zero and other mathematical concepts. What they are looking for will be statistically significant patterns in our code with "intelligent-like features" (ehhhh?) that are inconsistent with any naturally known process. Sounds like that book The Bible Code to me. Or using pretzel logic to find a cryptogram in Shakespeare that ends up reading, "I'm Sir Francis Bacon, and I approve of these plays."

So yea: here's yet another panspermia scenario of our origins. Which I'm open to. The proof will be in the pudding code though. The Kazakhs say this code, once deciphered will prove all those dummies who thought SETI and use of radio-telescopes to pick up non-random patterns from within the white noise wrong: it's in all our cells! It's the SETI of molecular biology! And I've heard there's a lot of white noise in there, too, but it's gooey.

No, but wouldn't this be mindblowing if they pulled it off? And a real coup for Kazakhstan, not to mention. Golly! They (the Kazakhs, not our designers from millions but probably multi-billions of years ago) say this "stamp" will have math-semantic info (talk about time-binding!) and be unmistakably OTHER, and be "the most durable construct known" and it's utterly outside neo-Darwinian models. I'm not even at a party and I sniff Intelligent Design, don't you?

On the other hand, let's cut these guys some slack. How much more unheimlich is this compared to The Matrix trilogy? Or, serious philosopher Nick Bostrom's idea that there's a better than 50% chance that we're all living in a simulation? We live in a hologram? And I have a dippy blog there? Whoa!

Okay, okay, but Who or What designed the designer(s)?

At this point I whip out of its fine-tooled corinthian-leather sheath my Occam's Razor and see that once upon a time, one fine infinite day, Cosmic Mommy and Cosmic Daddy loved each other very very very much...

Improvisations off Leary and Wilson's 5th Circuit

A couple of years ago I read Harvard History professor Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History and the Brain. Smail is interested in pre-history of humans, so he has a tough row to hoe, since by definition there are no written documents. Still, I thought he did a hell of a job. What a terrific read. And what's stuck with me ever since was his notion that, very early in our development as hominids, we began to develop techniques to alter our own consciousness ("autotropic") and the neurochemistry of others, from a distance ("teletropic"). Smail notes that we haven't stopped since we began this and have developed an extraordinary "array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers."

This resonated with me in a number of ways. Books on the cognitive science of pleasure have been proliferating over the past ten to 13 years, and some of them seem quite good. I also read about pleasure with an eye toward Timothy Leary's and especially Robert Anton Wilson's posits regarding their Eight Circuit Brain model and metaphor, and pleasure seems to have most to do with their 5th Circuit. For those new to this Model, who are interested in finding out more, both thinkers wrote quite a lot about the Eight Circuit Brain (8CB) model, and much of it is diffused throughout their texts; for starters I would look at Leary's Info-Psychology, section 11, "A Neurosomatic Aesthetic: Beauty is Natural, Art is Artificial," pp.27-31. Very late in Leary's life he told his colleague R.U. Sirius (AKA Ken Goffman) that Wilson had developed Leary's 8CB model to such a degree that he knew it better than Leary himself did. (I'm paraphrasing from a passage in Design For Dying that I don't have on hand at the moment.)

From Wilson there is much writing on this 5th Circuit all-over-body pleasure/rapture, but if I had to pick one section of one book, read chapter 11 of Prometheus Rising: "The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit," pp. 177-194, which is replete with ideas about the evolution of this circuit in humanity, quotes from Adepts, a discussion that intertwines history, class, yoga, cannabis, sex, comparative religious aspects, fear of these states of pleasure by Priests and Kings, its relationship with hypnosis and brainwashing, exercises for the reader to experience this "circuit," and the idea that this circuit might be involved in some sort of teleological movement in human evolution toward space travel. Most of the time, in any of Wilson's books, when he's discussing tantric sex or cannabis use he's also writing about some aspect of this "circuit."

For both Leary and Wilson this metaphorical "circuit" is associated with healing, floating, bliss, aesthetics, deep enjoyment in the whole body, flexibility in mind and body, "glowing" sexual and sensual beauty, and tolerance of difference.

Both thinkers employed various nomenclature regarding this "circuit": hedonic, neurosomatic, cybersomatic intelligence, psychosomatic synergy, and many others. You get the picture. They guessed that this circuit was relatively recent historically, and was indeed historical: there was writing and surplus and a relatively wealthy caste that had the time to pursue methods of whole-body bliss. The first articulators of this circuit may have been Hindus, but Smail's book and others suggest the picture may be more complex than this.

Some Recent Riffs on Pleasure
First off, I'm struck by the proliferation of books and research on the subject while the very cultures that support the research and readership seem to be undergoing crises of mistrust between governments and the governed (see "NSA and Snowden"), and rapidly accelerating inequality in income. One wonders about the semantic unconscious and this development, which might require a better mind than mine for a satisfying analysis.

1.) Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus (last seen at NYU) wondered about our appreciation of cave paintings versus the latest 3-D, audio-sensurround extravaganza. He thinks artists become savvier and savvier over time about what makes humans tick, and takes a page from Stephen Jay Gould, who in his 1980 collection The Panda's Thumb described how Disney had, over decades, retooled Mickey Mouse's image, so slowly that no one noticed. But Mickey has become "cuter and cuter: less adult, less threatening, more juvenile, more adorable." (Marcus) In describing the "evolution" of music, Marcus writes, "My contention is that music is like Mickey: not the direct product of evolution at all, but the product of artists evolving their craft in order to tickle the brain in particular ways. Music, art, and iPhones spread not because we have innate circuitry for funky dance beats or electronic toys, but because musicians, artists, and inventors are often uncommonly talented at reverse-engineering the human psyche." (see Guitar Zero, p.113)

Here we would be talking about Smail's teletropic aspect of brain-state modulation. For autotropic developments, pay attention to whatever you and your friends are doing that gets you high or makes you feel a deep pleasure.

2.) Two "field reports" on cannabis use from Dale Pendell's marvelous Pharmako/Poeia:

I used it to learn organic chemistry. If I memorized the reactions both straight and high, they stuck and I never forgot them. - "a student"

Sex is affected also: other worldly, this worldly, her worldly, his worldly, one-worldly. Two voices singing one aria, creation and improvisation in one long, stretching, eternal now. Tactile sensations exist in their own space: accessible to both but owned by neither. Genitals and other bodily parts expand, become the whole body, the two of you climbing over them like Lilliputians. - Pendell himself, see p. 202

If ya ain't got the gnosis...We're making it more available all the time. Step right up! (And board a trip to Colorado?) Or just go get your Card?

[Side note: for all those who see the reading of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and...poetry in general as unpleasantly effortful or just too goddamned difficult, I report very good results from using a method much like the organic chemistry student, above. And aye: deeply pleasurable.]

Talk about pre-history: how does the Cambrian explosion hit ya? 600 million years ago, the fossil record shows that, for some "reason" Life decided to go nuts with just the most psychedelic expansion of new forms of critters. This seemingly overnight copious display of creativity by Nature was one argument, Darwin thought, against his idea of relatively slow evolution by means of natural selection. It led Gould and Eldredge to invent the evolutionary of idea of "punctuated equilibrium."

What does this have to do with pleasure? Stick with me here for a sec or two.

The US government, for near 100 years, has been at war with cannabis. Agents for the government still claim that we don't know enough about cannabis to declare its safety. Being morally and intellectually bankrupt themselves, they ought have no say in the matter. But they're wrong anyway: despite the prohibition against doing scientific research into cannabis, there's now an overwhelming body of evidence to make Obama look like a damned fool (again?) when he recently said - probably thinking himself charitable? - that pot is no more dangerous than alcohol. In fact, it's far, far more healthy. Ironically, the Unistat government funded a study of the human immune system, giving funds to researchers at the St. Louis University School of Medicine. In 1988 the researchers showed that a major component of the immune system is the endocannabinoid system: these are receptor sites all over the body (recall Wilson's term "psychosomatic synergy") that regulate immune function, body temperature, blood pressure, hunger, relaxation, sleep cycles, bone density, inflammation, and fertility.

And when did the endocannabinoid system arise, evolutionarily? In the Cambrian explosion, with tunicates. Sea-squirts! They had elementary backbones and a cannabinoid system 600 million years ago. (We share 80% of our DNA with them, as Ripley would say: believe it or not!) Today, all animals except insects have this system.

But wither pleasure here? Just this:

Smoking cannabis docks one of around 100 phytocannabinoids (plant-based cannabinoids) in receptor sites that we have endogenously. One of the psychoactive effects of cannabinoids is the ability to cause us to "break set": we become temporarily more amenable to new ideas, new approaches to things that we previously reacted habitually to. Speculating from there: Darwinian survival is all about fitness over changing environments. When the environment changes, time for new ideas. And for new ideas to come into play, there should be some alteration of memory, which plays a big part in habits. Endocannabinoids such as Anandamide help us to forget things that we don't need to clutter our minds with, which is easily seen as adaptive. Cannabis has been shown to encourage neurogenesis in the hippocampus: new neurons, new neural-circuits, novel connections. Cannabis seems to have played a big part in adaptation over the Longue Duree. When the "normal" environment threw us for a loop, it may have been a very good idea to just, like...hold on, man. Let's sit down and have a smoke or ingest this godstuff and talk this out. There's gotta be some way we can deal with this. Let's chill. Memory seems thus psycho-somatic, all over the body. The cannabinoid system CB2 has receptor sites distributed throughout the body and internal organs. There is no mind-body duality...

Pot does more
Than Newton can
To justify
Goddess's ways to man.
-paraphrase from a classic poem

A cannabis high feels so good maybe because we co-evolved with the endocannabinoid system, which probably got going with the Cambrian Explosion. Nature threw in this Gift, and we ought never let any cops keep us from it, for any reason. (Still have some ways to go...)

Summary of this section: I posit the development of the endocannabinoid system as at least the scaffolding for very much of what we consider "pleasurable" today.

3.) In a recent book by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works, he notes early on his colleague Paul Rozin's observation that, "(I)f you look at a psychology textbook, you will find little or nothing about sports, art, music, drama, literature, play, and religion. Bloom says that these are "central to what makes us human, and we won't understand any of them until we understand pleasure." (p.xiv)

A most fascinating aspect of Bloom's book, for me, has been his very-convincing argument that humans are essentialists: they/we perceive/imagine a "real" essence "in" objects and people. This essentialism was something that Korzybski (not mentioned in Bloom's book) thought was a mistake that led us to act irrationally and non-adaptively, and should be overcome if we are to survive as a species. Bloom shows that rationality and looking into things - say, scientifically - was essentialist and yet led many humans to reject essentialism for a nascent body of mathematical and scientific "facts" about the physical world. I now see essentialism in a new light, and I do think these relatively new insights can be read as making Korzybski's thought even more robust...even if we must accept essentialism as something that absolutely will NOT go away any time soon.

In a chapter on how religion gives pleasure by firing our imaginations about "deeper realities," Bloom discusses some of the so-called New Atheists:

They are not blind to the attraction of a deeper reality; they just resonate to this attraction outside the bounds of organized religion. As an illustration, consider the view of some prominent modern-day atheists. I have already discussed how Richard Dawkins wrote a book about the transcendent appeal of scientific inquiry. Sam Harris is well known for his attack on the monotheistic faiths, but he is strongly enthusiastic about Buddhism, describing it as "the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." And Christopher Hitchens, author of  God Is Not Great, has spoken about the importance of the "numinous" - which usually refers to the experience of contact with the divine - and has argued that one can experience it without religious or supernatural belief. He suggests that humans rely on the numinous and transcendent, and says that personally he wouldn't trust anyone who lacked such feelings.
-p.215

4.) Because I've gone on too long, I take leave here by linking to a popular listicle-article about why sex is good for us, trusting the links within my link will lead to something moderately illuminating, or at least for laffs. What interests me here is how much of what sex does that's healthy intersects and intermingles and even seems to have intercourse with what cannabis does.

I take hashish with some followers of the eighteenth-century mystic Saint-Martin. At one in the morning, while we were talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of letters...caught in our dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to all codes, but we smile at her benevolently and laugh. - William Butler Yeats, Autobiography

a prominent 20th century science writer and thinker and public intellectual, on cannabis:
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad. - Carl Sagan, in 1969, on his experiences smoking cannabis, which he did to the end of his life. See HERE.

Some Sources
"The Marijuana Miracle: Why a Single Compound in Cannabis May Revolutionize Modern Medicine," by Martin Lee
"The Lie That Won't Die: 'We Don't Know Enough About Marijuana'," by Paul Armentano
"High on Health: CBD in the Food Supply," by Allen Badiner
"Science For Potheads: Why People Love To Get High," by K.M. Cholewa
"Sea Squirt, Heal Thyself: Scientists Make Major Breakthrough in Regenerative Medicine"
"Introduction To The Endocannabinoid System," by Dustin Sulak
"The Endocannabinoid System"
"How Sex Affects Intelligence, and Vice-Versa," by Dan Hurley
The Eight-Circuit Brain, by Antero Alli (I don't know what happened with this book, which I find to be a very unique take on Leary's and Wilson's ideas. Antero diverges from both significantly, but he's never boring. He knew RAW in Berkeley and writes about him in this book. Why is this book only available for $1500? I have a pristine, signed copy I'd be willing to part with for a mere $800. Contact me at that address ----->)


A 3 min, 30-second film that addresses tunicates (sea squirts) and the endocannabinoid system in all of us:

Irritate In Chic Bug: Notes on Four Articles

I. A year ago in National Geographic David Dobbs published a piece on "Restless Genes" in human history, and I recently re-read it. What marvelous science writing. Two models of "genes" and the expression of curiosity, restlessness, and risk-taking in history are put forth: a gene called DRD-4 has been implicated in learning and reward and it modulates dopamine, the most basic endogenous "reward" neurotransmitter. We all want a little dopamine fix every now and then. Actually, closer to now.

But researchers have repeatedly noted a variant on the gene, DRD-7R, seems highly correlated with history's risk-takers: people who are eager to explore new places and drugs, try new relationships, including sexual ones. They seem more eager to try new foods and ideas. They seek change and adventure and they were the ones who lit out for the frontier, the new territory. In non-human animals the maverick gene DRD-7R relates to more exploration of territory and novelty-seeking. In humans it's also related to ADHD. Chuaseng Chen of UC-Irvine has done research showing the DRD-7Rs are found more concentrated in migratory cultures than in settled ones. Other research suggests that DRD-7Rs wither in settled cultures: they need a cultural outlet for their expression of restlessness and neophilia.

                                      four explorers on the Nimrod expedition to the
                                      South Pole. Harrowing! Shackleton is the second
                                      from the left.

But it's not that simple: the macro-version of the gene story here is explained in Dobbs's article by evolution and population geneticist Kenneth Dodd of Yale, who was part of the team that first isolated the DRD-7R variant 20 years ago. He says the picture is far more complex than one gene variant giving rise to the various Ages of Exploration. There must be a group of genes involved, and furthermore: for the pioneering types to do their thing, the culture needs to have produced tools and incorporated other traits for the novelty-seekers first, which has led to this macro picture of human innovation and exploration: DRD-7R is an exciting feature in the story of human derring-do, but we first needed genes that built limbs and brains like we have! If you're going to be the first to mount an expedition to walk out of the known territory and over those hills in the distance to see what other tribes may live there, you needed long legs (like we have) and hips configured and conducive to long walks (like we have). It helps to have dextrous hands to grasp and manipulate tools (like we have), and it no doubt helped to have a very large but slow-growing brain that spent a lot of time imagining possible behaviors and playing games between 3-18 years old. (That's all of us, virtually.) As Dobbs writes, "Our conceptual imagination greatly magnifies the effect of our mobility and dexterity, which in turn stirs our imagination further." Feedback loops inside of feedback loops, churning and seeking, spreading information and firing more imaginations.

But read the article if you haven't already. You'll get accounts of Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton, mutant genes for tolerating lactose, and pioneering Quebec logging communities. And what was most fascinating to me: the latest research on how people who live on all those tiny islands in the South Pacific got there. I was used to reading Out of Africa stories that headed north and "made a left" toward southern Europe...probably because of my ego? That would be my ancestors's earliest route out of Africa. But others made a right, and that has made all the difference.

II. In May of 2013 a study in Psychological Science appeared, conducted by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and UC Santa Barbara, which studied attitudes about redistribution of wealth among men in Denmark, Unistat, and Argentina, all of which have welfare systems very different from each other. A high correlation was found between men with strong upper body strength who disliked redistributive schemes (welfare ideas) and men with less upper body strength, who favored more redistribution. The researchers think there may be something quite ancient (and unconscious?) in political ideology. When I read the piece I realized I had intuited their findings a long time ago, but it was only intuition. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides were involved in the study, and I still find their book The Adapted Mind most interesting among the books that Stephen Jay Gould charged were "Darwinian Fundamentalism." An earlier version of this study appeared in late 2012, and Natasha Lennard, one of writers at Salon that I find not-execrable, articulated my thinking fairly accurately HERE.

                                         So. Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where a
                                         disagreement over Kant led to a shooting

III. Last September, a story appeared out of southern Russia which appealed to a dank corner of my own sense of mordant humor: two guys in their twenties were waiting in line for beer at an outdoor event in a beautiful city, Rostov-on-Don. The topic of Immanuel Kant came up and there was a fierce disagreement over some aspect of the philosopher well-known for his writings on ethics and a universal morality within humankind. Things escalated and one guy shot the other in the head with an air gun, sending him to the hospital but not killing him. The assailant faces 20 years, and the author of this brief article suggests 20 years is a long time to better get to know Kant's ideas about ethics and morality. The short piece is HERE.

IV. So there was apparently this star male philosophy professor who seduced a beautiful and brilliant student. Rumors and gossip raged, then she began to show her pregnancy. It was a huge scandal, and the student's uncle's anger was boiling at the professor. The professor thought the best thing to do would be to marry the student. She was against this. But they did anyway, in secret. The results of improprieties around sex were so scandalous the professor hid his new bride in a nunnery. Then the uncle had some thugs break in to the professor's house and cut off his penis while he was sleeping; an earlier version of Bobbitizing a guy. (The most unkindest cut of all. But of course I'm horribly, clangingly biased.) The professor, now a eunuch, took up a life in a monastery. He and his wife exchanged letters for the rest of their lives and these letters have kept scholars busy ever since.

You may have heard of the professor and his student: they were Abelard and Heloise, and the action took place 900 years ago. I mention it because I enjoyed reading this book review by Barbara Newman of a new edition of versions of the letters. I hadn't known about dificilio lectio, which says, when faced with anomalous and competing versions of the "same" text that had been copied by hand by scribes, choose the "more difficult" one, because it's more likely to be authentic. This seems like a proto-inchoate intuition about information theory, in which longer messages, when passed from person to person via memory, get shorter.

I find it very intriguing that Heloise may have been a sort of 21st century feminist, according to one reading of translations of her letters.

The Drug Report: July, 2012: Coffee and Velocity

"Betty: Dear father, don't be so strict! If I can't have my little demitasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just like a dried-up piece of roast goat!" - from J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata

---------------------------------------------------

Of surpassing fascination to me is the overwhelming ubiquity of drugs in our culture - both legal and illegal - and (here's where my wonderment comes in) how relatively ignorant we make ourselves about these drugs. Name the drug, and you will have zero problems finding a widespread un-knowing about some aspects of the drug, even though the information is easy to find. Is knowing the truth about psychoactive drugs culturally taboo?

Now, now, coffee lovers (Pssst: I'm one too), don't fear: we have our ignorances about our drug, but they seem less serious than that for other drugs. I've tried to find some good studies that show how coffee is dangerous, but there doesn't seem to be much there. Au contraire, as a matter of fact. More below. 

But first, another drug as a diversion:
"Imagine if the Japanese had won World War II and had introduced into American life a drug so insidious that thirty years later the average American would spend five hours a day 'loaded' on this drug. People would just view it as an outrageous atrocity. And yet, we in America do this to ourselves. And the horrifying thing that the 'trip' that television gives you is that it's not your trip. It is a trip that comes down through the values systems of a society whose greatest god is the almighty dollar. So television is the opiate of the people. I think that the tremendous governmental resistance to the psychedelic issue is not because psychedelics are multi-million dollar criminal enterprises - they are trivial on that level. However, they inspire examination of values, and that is the most corrosive thing that can happen." - Terence McKenna, in an interview with Neville Drury from 1990, found pp.245-246, The Archaic Revival.

I like the TV as quasi-psychedelic opiate trip drug that's very addictive line here. I like the questioning of "whose trip do you want to be in: theirs or yours?" line from Terence here. I'm afraid not much thinking about TV has taken place. I've seen a few studies that show that university kids don't understand how those commercials got there. They don't know that the TV people tell the beer or toilet paper people, "We have a show that will deliver your desired demographic to you, and all it'll cost you is X." I also like the implication that, though it's almost totally not spoken about, drugs are programming devices that are seen as very powerful by different factions of powerful people. Terence thought the real reason psychedelics were illegal was that they threatened the paideuma.

[Sorry but I need to make a further foray away from our topic of the day, coffee. I'll get back in a moment.]

I wonder if this is the main reason Obama went back on his word and began harassing the medical pot places in a way that would have Bush43 proud? HERE is an article that posits the other main reasons why did this. The irony of paideuma! According to this article, it's either 1.)He didn't want to appear soft on crime; 2.) He thinks stoners don't vote; or 3.) The states appeared to be going too far, allowing things to become too lax. I think all of these could be "true" in some sense, but we ought to consider the unspoken "corrosive" "examination of values" that McKenna talked about.

Sooo: coffee.

                    I had no idea that coffee art was a...thingy. Check out
                     THIS blog for more coffee-art

"Coffee falls into the stomach and there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the Republic on the battlefield...The light cavalry of comparisons delivers charges, the artillery of logic hurries up with trains and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle begins and is concluded with torrents of black water, just like a battle with powder." - Honore de Balzac, who supposedly drank 80-100 cups of coffee a day, and wrote over 100 novels. He'd get paid for a novel and go out and spend it on whores and other interesting people in all-night carousing with alcohol and who knows what else. When his money was gone, he'd get back in his room with coffee and crank out another novel. Balzac was what we once called a "Romantic."

Speaking of similes, I was reading a cracking good book by a journalist very much interested in the botany of great cannabis. The book's called The Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race For the Cannabis Cup, by Mark Haskell Smith. Maybe I'll review it here when I'm done reading it, but anyway, similes:

Smith is wearing out shoe leather in LA, trying to understand the medical pot and politics current, and finds himself in a...consortium where there's some really good strains of cannabis being sampled, and a large-screen HD TV on, showing the Oscars. He's asking questions, getting stoned, writing notes, every now and then diverted by the TV:

"Demi Moore strutted her cougar stroll on the red carpet dressed in ruffled salmon-colored freak-out. The dress looked like a cake you'd order from an insane asylum." (p.22)

Oh yea: I was supposed to be writing something about coffee. Sorry!

Get a load of this, a coffee ad from the 1650s.

If you had been worrying about adverse health effects from drinking coffee, a recent article from The Atlantic attempts to put us at ease. Leg muscles and the diaphragm were strengthened in older mice! A decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma in humans! A decreased risk of death, especially if you quit smoking while you drink coffee! Coffee seems to have heart-protecting aspects. It reduces the risk of breast and prostate cancer and curbs risk of fibrosis among those with fatty liver disease. Even the moderate noise of a coffee shop was shown to enhance creativity!

Jeez, speaking of creativity, did you see where one of my favorite young hotshot science writers, Jonah Lehrer, was forced to quit The New Yorker when another magazine caught him making up fake Bob Dylan quotes for Lehrer's book, Imagine? HERE's a story on the temporarily-fallen Lehrer, a brilliant young guy, who, I "imagine" (HA!), got caught up in the dog-eat-dog welt of competitive "smart guy" writing in New York. I also imagine he was drinking too much coffee and maybe not thinking straight when he started piling up the prevarications to the writer from Tablet. Hey, wait: isn't Tablet a pro-Israel magazine? Has Jonah not been sufficiently supportive of Israel? Were they out to "get" Jonah? Naw, probably not. That's just my over-caffeinated mind making too many connections, and now I've noticed I've once again crazily strayed from the topic at hand.

But the infamous Jayson Blair has stepped into the Jonah Lehrer story and has hitched his junk-bond status as writer to former Golden Boy Jonah's...I'm guessing as a way to alleviate his own rep?

                               Right about now I know exactly what this guy means

"The perfect drug for capitalism. Is there an office anywhere that does not have its shrine to the coffee gods?" 

"On the other hand, it's not a bad beverage for anarchists. Or for town meetings."
-both above quotes from Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions and Herbcraft, by Dale Pendell, to my mind the greatest writer in the world on drugs. If you're interested in any drugs of any kind, and you haven't settled down to dwell within one or more of Pendell's Pharmako trilogy, you're committing some sort of sloth, or violating the Drug Scholar's Code. Something like that...

Pendell taxonomically calls coffee part of the poison-world of excitantia. He gives very good reasons why.

Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson considered coffee a 3rd circuit drug. What that means is that, in the evolution of humans, we inherited a newborn's approach/avoidance circuit that relates to the amniotic world of mom, and its analog drug is opiates. As we become toddlers and start to command space in the local household, becoming political as Terrible Two-sters, making demands, attempting to manipulate others via emotional games, we imprinted a 2nd circuit, and its analog drug is alcohol. (Look at adults shit-faced drunk for the utmost clarity here.) Our species began to manipulate tools and language a long time ago, and this laid down the DNA-culture template for taking on a circuit about manipulating tools and symbols. Both Leary and Wilson saw coffee as the ultimate symbol of this symbol-manipulating drug. 

There are five more circuits, but I will exercise some control over my symbol-manipulating impulses, wildly charged on too much coffee for this blog post (as if you couldn't already tell!), and say that if you want to know more about the Leary/Wilson very elaborate hyper-multidisciplinary, generalist model of human consciousness, you'll have to read their books...

Olfactory Hallucinations
Weird coffee/caffeine item: some psychologists were wondering if, when people have panic attacks, how much of it is the brain doing something subconscious and how much has to do with thinking about - anxiety-provoking things? They injected sleeping subjects with fairly high doses of caffeine. A 38 year old man with no previous history of psychiatric problems awoke 14 minutes after the injection, reporting an odd taste, but more like an odor. A 34 year old woman with generalized anxiety disorder awoke after her injection and said she smelled plastic or "burnt coffee." These are called "olfactory hallucinations." The caffeine injected had no known odor. Olfactory hallucinations are related to seizures, but neither subject was having a seizure when they woke and reported the odors. 

Two hypotheses here:
1.) Caffeine is widely known as a taste enhancer, so maybe the injections of caffeine caused the subjects to pick up smells and tastes that are normally undetectable?
2.) The caffeine prompted sensory systems to "trick" themselves?
Who knows? Anyway, hat-tip to the wonderful Maggie Koeth-Baker of Boing Boing for this odd item.

The Turks: Two Items
Much has been written about the coffee houses of London and the flowering of (3rd-circuit) print culture, explosion of writing and printing. But HERE's an article from Science Daily about coffee and its environment and its stimulus to the socially-aggregated 3rd circuit, in the Turkish 1550s!

Sorry, but back to Obama and his war on pot: check out the Young Turks and their analysis. I currently (get it? they're on the Current network? <cough>) think they're more accurate than anyone else in the TV-world in their analysis of the Barackstar and his quasi-fascistic, retrograde actions against the dispensaries. Note that here is a fifth reason: Big Pharma's non-conspiracy (?):

Note to OG readers: sorry I hardly wrote anything of interest about coffee, but my excuse is: I was WASTED on too much coffee. Maybe I'll try again in August? Mea culpa!