Our Bi-Annual Nonsense

Tomorrow night we will turn the clocks back one hour in a continuation of an archaic, uneconomic, dangerous and energy-wasting exercise favoured by the big gas companies. How can we still be so stupid!

This is the twice a year moment when I wish I lived in Saskatchewan!

Odds & Sods #4

• David Kamp has written a fascinating detective story surrounding the legendarily prodigious eating feats of Diamond Jim Brady.  He suspects some exaggeration, but the reality is probably close enough.
• Gertrude Baines, daughter of slaves and Obama voter, takes on the most dangerous job in the world.  The previous job-holder survived just four months in the position.
• How do salmon find their way back home after years in the ocean?  The open sea part still seems a bit iffy, but once they reach the river, it’s the schnozz that leads.  Maybe Jimmy Durante is their patron saint?
• The earliest artificial eye has been discovered at an archaeological dig in Iran.

Sleep Is Great

I had an interesting and busy day yesterday.  I wrote some, I painted some, I read some, I watched a lot of cricket.   My glorious wife baked some of the finest bread it is possible to eat, and we generally had good food the whole day through.  I thoroughly enjoyed all those activities — but the best thing of all was the nap I took in the afternoon.

My better half  likes to snooze on the couch, life going on around her.  And I somehow manage to snooze on the bus most mornings and evenings.  But a real nap is a serious business for me.  It is a take-off-all-your-clothes-get-into-bed-and-under-the-covers-with-the-blinds-drawn affair.  Given the right conditions, I don’t expect to be awake longer than a few seconds after my head hits the pillow, and it is hard to have a decent nap in under two hours.  Yesterday, I slept from about 2:30 until 5.  Wonderful.

It is gratifying, therefore, to find that modern scientific research is beginning to understand and appreciate the value of sleep.  It is good to know that sleep helps to strengthen memories, that the brain gets a chance to sort and file, and that sleep can help you think through problems.

Over just the past few years, a number of studies have demonstrated the sophistication of the memory processing that happens during slumber. In fact, it appears that as we sleep, the brain might even be dissecting our memories and retaining only the most salient details … During sleep, the brain reactivates patterns of neural activity that it performed during the day, thus strengthening the memories by long-term potentiation … Adding to the excitement, recent discoveries show that sleep also facilitates the active analysis of new memories, enabling the brain to solve problems and infer new information … It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there.

But even more gratifying is to find a piece like Jenny Diski’s Diary:

[S]leeping, for all its inherent dangers and waste, is and always has been my activity of choice. Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep … Sleep, while it is happening, is nothing to the sleeper. To an observer all kinds of things are happening to the sleeper while she sleeps … Watch sleeping people smile, or mutter, fidget, laugh and shriek. So the observer knows about it, watching you; you do not. Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me.

Germs ‘R’ Us

There isn’t as much of each of us as we thought. The latest research suggests that each of us contains ten times as many bacteria as human cells — we are, in fact, just a small minority of our own bodies!

Changes in these microbial communities may be responsible for digestive disorders, skin diseases, gum disease and even obesity. Despite their vital imporance in human health and disease, these communities residing within us remain largely unstudied …

Martin Blaser of New York University has been working to identify the various bacteria that live on the human skin and help to form a protective barrier on the outside. Before he started his research it was estimated that fewer than 100 different species of bacteria lived on the skin … Blaser now estimates the number of different bacteria species living on the skin could approach 500 …

Due to their overwhelming numbers, the fact that their byproducts can be found in most human fluids, and the evidence of their potential role in health and disease, it is quite possible that mapping and understanding the human microbiome may be as important or more important to understanding human health than mapping and understanding the human genome.

So remember, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you are never alone.

The Highest of Mountains and the Longest of Memories

Today is the 55th anniversary of the first successful climbing of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.  News of the success arrived in England the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and I remember my father, who was very excited by the news, telling me all about it.  For years thereafter Edmund Hillary was the greatest hero of my young imagination.

I have one or two memories about my brother and me that pre-date May 1953, but Hillary on Everest is the earliest I can recall anything outside the family.  I know from photographs that there were massive street parties I attended to celebrate the new Queen: I remember none of that.  But Hillary on Everest has stuck with me all these years.

The picture is of Tensing Norgay taken by Hillary.  There are no pictures of Hillary on the summit because Tensing didn’t know how to work the camera and, as Hillary said, the summit of Everest was no place to start teaching him!

Memories Are Made Of This

I was wandering along on my way to the bus this morning thinking about how quickly the year is passing; it will be June already in a week or so. That got me thinking about how time seems to speed up as we age, that the days seem more fleeting than they did when I was a kid, or even a young man. And that little reverie kick-started a theory of why the passage of time should seem different at different ages.

Let us first suppose that the neural mechanism for working out how long ago an event of a known date seems to have taken place involves flipping through a catalogue of our memories and making a calculation based somehow on the amount — or “bulkiness” — of the memory pile.

Let us next suppose that one suffers from the occasional short term memory loss — a standard condition of getting older it seems — such that a wide range of time is simply not memorialized.

Thus, when the mind flips through the memory for a particular period, the file seems less “bulky” (because of the missing memories) and the time between then and now will appear to have gone past quicker.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

Kissing

Kisses are such glorious business that it seems a shame, perhaps, to allow scientists to get their grubby hands into the entrails of such a wonderful experience. 

“Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.”

… In the 1960s British zoologist and author Desmond Morris first proposed that kissing might have evolved from the practice in which primate mothers chewed food for their young and then fed them mouth-to-mouth, lips puckered. Chimpanzees feed in this manner, so our hominid ancestors probably did, too. Pressing outturned lips against lips may have then later developed as a way to comfort hungry children when food was scarce and, in time, to express love and affection in general.

So says (and so much more) a fascinating piece in Scientific American. 

Me?  I just like the taste and the texture and the smell and the cuddling that goes along with the kissing.  It would be a far less wonderful space my lover and I inhabit if we didn’t kiss so much.  That much I do know.

Whales, It Seems, Don’t Sleep Much

What is it that we don’t already know about whales? They have been the planet’s favourite cause for many years now. Well, it seems that they don’t need very much sleep; and the sleep they do get may only be in half their brain at any one time.

Sperm whales literally drift to sleep, but it’s a snooze like no other, according to a recent study that found whales perform slow, rhythmic dives as they slumber. Because these drift dives keep the whales in constant motion as they rest, scientists now think the seafaring mammals sleep with one side of their brain at a time. The two sides alternate until both are rested …

The scientists observed two types of drift dives. The first, head-up drift dives, happen when a whale’s rear end slowly sinks into the water from a horizontal posture. During the second type, head-down, the whale descends slowly with its head directed toward the ocean floor. It travels downward about one or two body lengths in depth before flipping back upward toward the water’s surface. The researchers think the whale’s internal buoyancy causes this natural upward motion, similar to how a sinking apple eventually bobs back to the surface …

“Their bodies have found a way to cope, offering evidence that sleep isn’t necessary for development, and raising the question of whether humans and other mammals have untapped physiological potential for coping without sleep,” said Jerome Siegel, director of the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Interesting research, with more detail at Discovery News.