Watching or reading anything more than once is rare for me and that is another reason these two videos are linked. If you missed TED.COM, take a closer look, it is clearly a different species than YouTube. I have both of these presentations on my desktop and have distributed and shouwn them more than anything else, ever.
Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful talk about her stroke became a phenomena and led to book, NPR, and a curious sort of fame. I believe it touches the spiritual in a powerful way:
It is possible to download TED MP4 videos, I like that.
I learned of Dean Ornish and his heart diet from an engineer I worked with 15 years ago. Recent health issues led me back and I'm a bigtime supporter:
There are two other talks from Ornish on TED, If you are interested, search them out.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Exposing Our Roots
In "Time After Time", Oren Harman, the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome (Harvard University Press) and the co-editor of Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology (Yale University Press), describes the deep connections, old as the sun and moon, to our natural history.
The essay concludes:
"We live in a maniacally fast and busy world, in which television and radio update our every minute and working hours and travel are increasingly heedless of the cadences of our planet. Evolution and chronobiology teach us that our inner and outer worlds are fundamentally connected. But finally how we view time is intimately connected to our dreams and aspirations--the way we would like to see the poem of our lives, and of our world, written. Will we wish to continue our growing detachment from the cycles of the sun and moon and tide and planets, or will nature more powerfully, or rudely, return us to its order? In the end, it may be up to us."
Full of facts:
"....We live in a "24/7" world, and have cleverly invented the modern means--electricity, alarms, heating, pharmaceuticals--to overcome our ancient evolutionary rhythms. No longer bound to the cadences of nature, we need not shiver in winter and rise early in the summer months--or so most of us believe.
But it turns out that we are wrong. Just like all the living things around us, we are constitutionally defined by our internal rhythms, and it takes more than a few thousand years of culture to override a few billion years of evolution. Heart attacks and births, Foster and Kreitzman report, occur most often between four o'clock and six o'clock in the morning. Toothaches are calmest after lunch, urine is produced fastest in the evening, and you are most likely to develop an allergic reaction an hour before midnight. Body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure are all lower at night and higher during the day, and dance to a regular daily meter. Even cognitive ability varies throughout the day: take an exam at eight in the morning and your score is likely to be different from the result you would obtain on a test taken in the afternoon. In nature, there are intertidal, lunar, annual, and circadian ("about a day") rhythms, along with the lesser-known infradian (longer than a day) and ultradian (shorter than a day) cadences.
It stands to reason that such rhythms should have been etched into living beings over evolutionary time, for although the week and hour and minute are human inventions, the Earth will rotate on its axis about every twenty-four hours for at least the next five billion years, and the moon will wax and wane every 29.5 days, and the tide will roll over the waves twice a day, and Sirius the Dog Star will rise with the sun every 365 of them. For humans, it is primarily the circadian rhythms that govern much of our behavior (though female readers will rightly protest that I have never experienced certain rattling lunar effects). Whether you shake a hand firmly depends on the time of day, and may not seem all that important; but consider that there is a favored hour of lovemaking for married and non-married, child-rearing and childless, working and unemployed people, and your ear for chronobiology (named for Cronus, the Greek harvest deity) may suddenly perk up. There is a relationship, in sum, between our internal clocks and the outside world, and figuring out how that works has been one of the more exciting rides in modern biology."
But the paragraph that gave me a better perspective of entrainment (basis for binaural beats and blinking lights influencing brain waves) focused on linkage:
"So how is the inner clock made to synchronize with the environment? How, in the end, does an organism's "free rhythm" match itself to the demands of the outside world? Here is an example from another organism. In Drosophila flies, the FREQUENCY and WC-1 equivalents are called PER and TIM. When light reaches TIM through the optic nerve of the fly, it degrades it in a regular, predictable fashion. In this way, with the help of a few other proteins, the PER/TIM feedback loop is aligned to the light/dark cycle, providing the crucial link between inner and outer worlds. This process is called "entrainment," and while cues such as temperature, food availability, humidity, and even social contact can act as triggers, light is nature's greatest entrainer of all."
The essay concludes:
"We live in a maniacally fast and busy world, in which television and radio update our every minute and working hours and travel are increasingly heedless of the cadences of our planet. Evolution and chronobiology teach us that our inner and outer worlds are fundamentally connected. But finally how we view time is intimately connected to our dreams and aspirations--the way we would like to see the poem of our lives, and of our world, written. Will we wish to continue our growing detachment from the cycles of the sun and moon and tide and planets, or will nature more powerfully, or rudely, return us to its order? In the end, it may be up to us."
Full of facts:
"....We live in a "24/7" world, and have cleverly invented the modern means--electricity, alarms, heating, pharmaceuticals--to overcome our ancient evolutionary rhythms. No longer bound to the cadences of nature, we need not shiver in winter and rise early in the summer months--or so most of us believe.
But it turns out that we are wrong. Just like all the living things around us, we are constitutionally defined by our internal rhythms, and it takes more than a few thousand years of culture to override a few billion years of evolution. Heart attacks and births, Foster and Kreitzman report, occur most often between four o'clock and six o'clock in the morning. Toothaches are calmest after lunch, urine is produced fastest in the evening, and you are most likely to develop an allergic reaction an hour before midnight. Body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure are all lower at night and higher during the day, and dance to a regular daily meter. Even cognitive ability varies throughout the day: take an exam at eight in the morning and your score is likely to be different from the result you would obtain on a test taken in the afternoon. In nature, there are intertidal, lunar, annual, and circadian ("about a day") rhythms, along with the lesser-known infradian (longer than a day) and ultradian (shorter than a day) cadences.
It stands to reason that such rhythms should have been etched into living beings over evolutionary time, for although the week and hour and minute are human inventions, the Earth will rotate on its axis about every twenty-four hours for at least the next five billion years, and the moon will wax and wane every 29.5 days, and the tide will roll over the waves twice a day, and Sirius the Dog Star will rise with the sun every 365 of them. For humans, it is primarily the circadian rhythms that govern much of our behavior (though female readers will rightly protest that I have never experienced certain rattling lunar effects). Whether you shake a hand firmly depends on the time of day, and may not seem all that important; but consider that there is a favored hour of lovemaking for married and non-married, child-rearing and childless, working and unemployed people, and your ear for chronobiology (named for Cronus, the Greek harvest deity) may suddenly perk up. There is a relationship, in sum, between our internal clocks and the outside world, and figuring out how that works has been one of the more exciting rides in modern biology."
But the paragraph that gave me a better perspective of entrainment (basis for binaural beats and blinking lights influencing brain waves) focused on linkage:
"So how is the inner clock made to synchronize with the environment? How, in the end, does an organism's "free rhythm" match itself to the demands of the outside world? Here is an example from another organism. In Drosophila flies, the FREQUENCY and WC-1 equivalents are called PER and TIM. When light reaches TIM through the optic nerve of the fly, it degrades it in a regular, predictable fashion. In this way, with the help of a few other proteins, the PER/TIM feedback loop is aligned to the light/dark cycle, providing the crucial link between inner and outer worlds. This process is called "entrainment," and while cues such as temperature, food availability, humidity, and even social contact can act as triggers, light is nature's greatest entrainer of all."
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