A long ago amusing anecdote in a letter home by a relative visiting my mother-in-law -- then a girl on a farm in Quebec at the turn of the 19th century -- sticks in my mind. The little boy who for the first time was on a farm and witnessed a cow being milked had two questions. The first one was worry that the teats would be pulled off the cow and the second one was wondering how the milk now in buckets that had drained the cow, could be replenished in the cow so that she could be milked again. He was onto something.
Maybe we don’t think enough about the durability of natural processes and the reciprocity of renewal cycles when it comes to bodies. I’ve been particularly interested in the metabolic and sensory/memory reciprocities in the brain. Many people have become informed about the production, exhaustion, and re-uptake of hormones like serotonin. (If it gets too low, you will be devastated by depression.) I must monitor the production and exhaustion of glucose so it doesn’t damage my body. Glucose is what powers the brain. Women are acutely aware of the monthly cycle of the “female” hormones and the consequences as the life-cycle slowly transitions away from fertility to allow “male” hormones more importance.
Some people are deliberately interfering in their internal electrochemical loops to change their gender identities. But don’t get distracted — that’s not the focus of this post. I’m more interested in how the tits come off people who fail to replenish optimism and confidence. If you need a tag, the formal name for neural circuit technologies is “circuit neuroscience” .
“Such is the power of current technologies for manipulating activity in neural circuits, which are networks of interconnected nerve cells that work together to guide behavior. Neural circuit technologies allow us to dramatically modulate behavior in animals simply by turning up and down activity in a specific component of a circuit. The two mainstays of neural circuit technologies are optogenetics, which uses light to alter neural activity, and pharmacogenetics, which uses designer drugs to do the same. They have helped the emerging field of circuit neuroscience dramatically enhance our understanding of how behavior is produced by neural activity. We now know, for example, that the neural circuits responsible for learning about threats in the environment can be separated from those responsible for learning about rewards in the environment. Inhibit the first and you reduce fear; inhibit the second, you reduce motivation. Compare this to pharmacological treatments for anxiety, which can impair both, and you can imagine the immediate payoff if we could do for people what we could do in animals: turn down the fear circuit without turning down the reward circuit, and you would get the benefit without the side effect.”
Make no mistake. Turning down the fear is only an intermediate step in a culture circuit that creates but fails to replenish the exploitation of danger and loss for the purpose of wealth. But runaway fear that saves lives depleted in ghettos and wars is a force that disables. (I used to have a counselor who said fear makes your brain go flat — it certainly feels that way.) If our brains are operational, they would surely wonder how to get confidence and energy back into survivors, how to get milk back into the cow.
Pharmacology has even teenagers on the streets chasing substances that affect the brain. Optogenetics is a highly technical way of inserting light responsive molecules into individual cells so they have on/off switches in them that make chemical reactions visible and might actually affect the operations of the cell. I suppose a very primitive version is the row of feral cats along the south side of the derelict building in my backyard, soaking up the sunshine that has finally returned after days of profound sub-zero cold. In fact, one of the early provocations for research was the connection between seasonal depression and light.
The idea of diminishing and replenishing cycles is basic to so much of life, right down to the renewal of culture and the continuity of species through generations or the seasonal rhythm of agriculture. But it always has a little wobble in it, the possibility of some new force throwing it into a different pattern. The scariest aspect of global “warming” is not an evenly rising temperature but rather the derangement of the weather flows that send air and water currents in mammoth gyres that feed warm currents along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and the steady flow of the jet stream west-to-east across the Rockies so as to generate Chinook winds. The warming of the North Pole, as we are acutely aware right now, creates Arctic Vortexes that plunge normally temperate temps to North Pole levels.
That costs money and energy. It depresses the hell out of me to have to double or triple my fuel bill, though Northwestern Energy doesn’t mind except that the monthly billing cycle begins to break down because people can’t afford to pay the high ones. Thus NW Energy offers account-averaging to cope. (They also impose a fee for turning one’s gas off in summer.) We’ve already had one person in Valier freeze to death sitting in his own front room. (Not this year.)
If the cycles of global weather alter enough — and this has happened in the past — the temperature and light dependent crops of the planet will fail — this HAS happened in the past — and thousands and millions of people will die of starvation. This happened in the past, often due to volcanic action on the planet, which appears to be cyclical, though we haven’t figured out what the cycle really is. The real danger of atomic attacks is not explosion nor even radiation but the global winter that will ensue from the dust circulating at the highest altitudes. North Korea would not be spared. They are already cold, dark, and starving from stuck political cycles.
Optogenetics or even pharmacogenetics can’t control volcanoes or even human behavior. Not so far. But they can help humans escape the paralysis and callousness that fail to prevent us from pulling the tits off the planet. We speak so blithely of “mother” earth, because the people who talk like that usually had good mothers with plenty of milk, like “the milk of human kindness.” A pretty simile. But what replenishes the lives and sustenance of all living things and nourishes the birth of the future?
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