TROPIC HORMONE LOOPS

When trying to get a more informed understanding of molecular feedback loops in the body, the first thing I had to learn was not to call them “feedback loops.”  It took a while to discover that the information I was looking for was indexed under “axis.”  That’s what they call what I call “feedback loops.”  They are key to the homeostasis self-regulation and self-development that guide survival, keep the body alive.

And it was confusing to read about “tropic hormones” when I was trying to find out which molecule did what, not where the warm climates are.  The specialized medical jargon means “tropic hormones” are those that impact other endocrine glands by secreting molecules into the blood and interstitial spaces.  Here’s a list with links:

 • Hypothalamus and Pituitary Gland

 • Thyroid and Parathyroid Glands

 • Adrenal Glands

 • Endocrine Pancreas

 • Gastrointestinal Hormones

 • Gonadal Hormone

 • Placental Hormones

 • Other Endocrine Tissues and Hormones

And two diagrams as examples:

Why would I care?

1.  I discover that my (mild) psoriasis/arthritis symptoms are probably affected by these loops.  (Eyes, hands)  I’m trying to understand inflammation which seems so central to current research.  Also, auto-immunity.

2.  So many lay people thinking about neurology are considering connections among neurons, which relates to muscle responses and designated sensory code in organs, while ignoring the unconscious saturations of molecules that govern organs and the autonomic nerve/endocrine connections that underlie our emotions.  

The arts reach into people, activating all sorts of axises.  (The literature seems to only consider one axis at a time.  But I’ve only begun to search.)  And, of course, people wrestling with diabetes know how much impact both glucose and insulin have on our systems.  Ignorance and denial can kill you.

3.  Drug use (ingesting of molecules, manmade, some as meds and sometimes for the sake of the physical senses and brain integration:  “feeling”, consciousness) is jumping off a bridge, not knowing how the deep the water is or even whether you can swim.  The doctors are often guessing.

4.  Sex is such a preoccupation of today’s culture, so twisted and exalted and generally misunderstood — as well as being entwined with violence and torture (kink) — that the relationships among what is hormonal, what is nervous, and what is beliefs or habits, keep imploding and exploding people’s lives.  It’s impossible to account for some of this without knowing about these “axes.”  And how do we tell sex from love?

8 years old

5.  Another subject that absorbs me is the transitions in development that define the adrenarche, the years from 8 or 9 until the adrenals kick off the pubertal, possibly steep, onset of sexuality.  See sex above.  Children of this age are often abused, maybe because of separation from nurturers and the ability to defy authority, and maybe because they somehow trigger sexual desire in some people, which is easier to understand when they become adolescent, semi-adult.  Interference with children during adrenarche really messes up their physical and emotional systems.  These are the years of identity formation, but the sexual component is not there yet.  The body is not ready yet.

I have questions about spanking as discipline and how it becomes so erotic for British and German schoolboys who have been caned.

6.  Soft-heartedness (feeding) has earned me a colony of feral cats.  They’re more fun than lab white mice, even when I can’t tame them.  The feral/domestic “axis” is a phenomenon that has interested me a long time.  It has become relevant in human terms.  Research on voles reveals a genetic connection determining sexual faithfulness vs. hit-and-run mating, so the feral/domesticated contrast seems to me relevant to the formation of families.

My Sister, My Womb-mate.

I have one pair of tame cats who were "wombmates" in an old mother cat.  Both are altered females, over a dozen years old now.  One is the color of chicken gravy and has about the same personality.  The other is tortoiseshell and spicy as a Senorita on Saturday night.  Is this an axis result?  Temperament in cats seems to be linked to coat color.

Today I ran across an article about the endocrine levels of cortisol and oxytocin in bummer lambs.  The little creatures attach intensely to caregivers which means they fight to be in proximity.  If they're loose, they can drive you crazy by constant bleating and crowding.  The two hormones (cortisol indicating stress and oxytocin relating to nurturing) rise when the lambs are penned.  Dunno what it means, but it’s intriguing that anyone would study it.  $40 to get the results.

Prince.

7.  Exceptional individuals — much on our minds with the death of Prince — raise a lot of questions about what I suppose I could call the “individual vs. community” axis, though it's not directly about hormones.  How much did we create Prince and how much did he create us?  Is it all just spontaneous and experiential or is there a genetic dimension?  (Both parents were musicians).  Usually the answer is “both.”  

8.  And, of course, it goes back to sex again.  How could a person so androgenous be so intensely sexual?  There are more than a few like him who are successful in sexwork — even without music.  What is “fluid sexuality”?   What does it mean to leave behind the binaries of male-and-female that have been so confining, but also give structure to a world where manmade polymer molecules intended for plastic packaging can interfere with human metabolism and destroy the digestive systems of whales who never enter supermarkets?

The Hypothalamus.

“All vertebrate brains contain a hypothalamus. In humans, it is the size of an almond.”  It’s the area just under the thalamus if that tells you anything except how it got its name.  All vertebrates have a hypothalamus, so it’s part of that unconscious-but-vital homeostasis limbic system that controls our emotions no matter how many grad degrees we have.  It links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland.

“The hypothalamus is responsible for certain metabolic processes and other activities of the autonomic nervous system. It synthesizes and secretes certain neurohormones, called releasing hormones or hypothalamic hormones, and these in turn stimulate or inhibit the secretion of pituitary hormones. The hypothalamus controls body temperature, hunger, important aspects of parenting and attachment behaviors, thirst, fatigue, sleep, and circadian rhythms.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamus#Nuclei   This links to a chart of all the hypothalamic nuclei.  They're like a keyboard for composing a body narrative.  (It’s not the same as the working platform of concepts that neurologists talk about, which can only handle a half-dozen projects at once.) Most of the information is descriptive, including descriptions of what can go wrong if one of the nuclei doesn’t work properly.  

In addition to all these nuclei pumping away, there are neural connections leading to specific other areas.  We’re told most of these neurons are two-way so they must be interpreting the code they get in order to respond with secretion and electrochemical impulse. 

The anonymous source in Wikipedia says:

"Several hypothalamic nuclei are sexually dimorphic; i.e., there are clear differences in both structure and function between males and females.

Elephant sea lions

Some differences are apparent even in gross neuroanatomy: most notable is the sexually dimorphic nucleus within the preoptic area. However most of the differences are subtle changes in the connectivity and chemical sensitivity of particular sets of neurons.

The importance of these changes can be recognised by functional differences between males and females. For instance, males of most species prefer the odor and appearance of females over males, which is instrumental in stimulating male sexual behavior. If the sexually dimorphic nucleus is lesioned, this preference for females by males diminishes. Also, the pattern of secretion of growth hormone is sexually dimorphic, and this is one reason why in many species, adult males are much larger than females.^”

^{If you want to know more about this dimorphic subject, be careful.  It lost the president of Harvard his job because some feminists were offended by him saying there was a difference between men and women.  In fact, much of all this information is "hot" and emotion-ridden, which is probably why people know so little about it.  We're still back at the taxonomy of anatomy in many ways, afraid of what we mind find out.}

THE SHADOW YEARS

My cousins and I at my maternal grandmother's funeral.  I'm 9 years old.

Latency and adrenarche are almost the same span of years in a life, but there is very little helpful information about either one.  “Latency” was the years Freud labeled sexless -- between phallic and genital.  Maybe age 6 to 12 or more.  He was quite wrong.  His label is a sort of excuse for ignoring children that age. They didn’t interest him, probably because they are the most powerful years and the most elusive.

The husbands and wives, mostly Hatfield men who married Pinkerton women.

My mother did not -- she ran off to the big city of Portland.

Adrenarche is the switch-on years when the adrenals are developed enough to begin turning on the process of growing the long bones of the limbs, the muscles attached to them, and the brain behind the forehead.  In the primal tribal places a girl in these years is put to work, taking care of younger kids, cooking, gathering wood.  Boys are simply turned loose and may run in packs hunting small animals or herding animals.  Girls stay with moms unless it’s a place where future husbands claim little girls.  In the rural country children this age are raising domestic livestock and hoeing gardens, learning about living creatures.

Sisters and cousins after the funeral.  Sun, garden, connection.

In Erik Erikson’s theories, this was the time for the evolution of the ego. The latency phase corresponds to the stage he called “competence”, or ‘industry and inferiority’, age 6 to puberty. The child is eager to learn new skills. During this stage, the child compares his/her self-worth to others.  Outside the family I was labeled smart and conscientious, which was a major drag to my brothers, who were just as smart but left-handed and not quite as bookish.  Teachers expected more from them because of my example.  I was "above-average" but not brilliant.

Christian Bale in latency.  ("Empire of the Sun")

Many childhood books are about this stage:  Harry Potter, Kim, the Little Prince, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.   Amazon offers a list:  “100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime: Selections for Ages 9-12.”  It’s the age for fairytales, mythology, sci-fi.  “The Princess and the Goblin,” “The Red Planet Mars.”  “Empire of the Sun.”  “My Friend Flicka,” “Heidi,” “Two Little Savages."   Life is an adventure that calls for heroism.  Latency aged kids think they can do anything, even save alcoholic parents.  Hans Brinker saved a country with his thumb.

In my personal case, these were confusing, literally painful times.  I had terrifying nightmares, possibly because of ocular migraine; my legs ached, which was diagnosed as “growing pains”; my maternal grandmother died of cancer which threw my mother into a grief depression; my father was in a head-on mountain highway collision with a drunk driver and sustained a concussion that affected his personality.  With three growing children in the family, there simply wasn’t enough room or enough money; and I was beginning to feel the first tendrils of sex. 

My world before glasses.

For some people, kids this age are objects of desire, esp. if the adults are predators who like to torture and beat up children.  They’re little enough to push around but old enough to comprehend and be terrorized, smart enough for mind games.  But still too young to get pregnant which would give some games away.  Children are physically small: they have been choked to death by forced fellatio and torn open by penetration.  Child bodies are seriously damaged by the drain of pregnancy.

In benign relationships, children this age are capable of great loyalty and intimacy.  In same-sex pairs they attach and bond, in gangs they crave secrecy and the power of the group.  To many of them animals carry magic.  It’s also one of the most rewarding school grades to teach.  The kids are growing, transforming, full of surprises, eager to learn.  They still think adults know a few things and will help them.

My brief career as a Campfire Girl.

It’s my life default age: about nine.   Under stress I become nine again.  That was the year my fourth grade teacher, a former WWII sergeant who was used to intervening, saw that I needed glasses, that it was the reason I got so angry and frustrated, read all the time, and cried too easily.  I simply I couldn’t see.  Glasses transformed the world.  And me.  My mother was chagrined to think she hadn’t noticed.  My brothers were tested right away.  Also at this point, my teeth began to disintegrate.  They weren’t malformed, but they were cavity-ridden and I spent hours with the dentist and have ever since -- in the periods when I had dental insurance.  In those early days it meant pain and humiliation.  Later on my father began to get very angry over the dental bills.  

Boy Scouts, preparation for the draft.

My brother is by the marker stuck in the ground.

Those were the music lesson years.  Piano for Mark and I.  Then violin for Mark.  Nothing for Paul.  None of us ended up playing.  I took ballet for which I was totally unsuited except for the intensity of my longing.  I took ballroom which I loathed and spent in the bathroom.  It wasn’t that we had bad teachers, but that we were undisciplined.  We didn’t practice, didn’t know how to focus and move ourselves into that frame of mind.  We had no strategy but opposition to authoritarian pressure.  

My mother’s group was the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) which she interpreted as a new version of the Professional Business Woman’s Club where she had been a leader in Roseburg.  My father’s affiliation was the Portland Chess Club and the Mazamas.  My mother and I were conscientious Presbyterians attending the neighborhood church which had an overambitious arrogant pastor.  

The Bruce Strachan nuclear family.

Our parents were also undisciplined.  A person needs to be taught how to accept being taught: listen, open up, assimilate new ideas.  They just did whatever had to be done.  As children they had been expected to work hard for the family and grab what escape they could.  They knew there was more, “higher” education, but not really what it was.  It seemed to them to be more an honor than an economic route.  A few people in their ancestry had been prosperous but none had been learned.

A child in latency is both reaching out as far as possible and also creating boundaries so as to have a private life.  The Revised Standard Edition of the Bible had just been completed so I sat down to read it.  When I got to the part about Noah’s daughters getting him drunk since, as the only man, he had to start a new generation, I was outta there.  I lasted longer with the "Decameron of Boccaccio", mostly because our high-status copy was one of a heritage set with thin paper and tooled leather binding.  My mother left the set to my brother, all the while railing against primogeniture.  The family tangle.  

I went into my bedroom and closed the door to read “Riders of the Purple Sage,” which was impressive enough that I eventually did it in real life.  For me the line between books and real life is very thin.  But I made a conscious decision to live the kind of life I had read about, so that I could write about it.  Survival puts limits on that, both the real and the romanticized.  My Depression-conscious parents and the media struggle to interpret Cold War kept raw survival always in front of us, but their response was to “fort up,” stick to family, never risk, stay in early jobs, travel but never get involved with locals, pay off the house you live in and never move again.  Do not modernize.  Depression and War are always there.  And the occasional catastrophe.

My father's 1948 accident.

He was thought to be okay, but he was not.

I suspect his overweight began here.

Of course, all this time my father was living out of cheap small town hotels for traveling salesmen while driving to Eastern Oregon or the Coast Range to keep up trade for an ag wholesale cooperative.  When he came home on weekends, there was a little festival of movies and ice cream sodas at Jolly Joan’s.  Then he would go into a rage of frustration while doing his expense account.  No adult became violent to another adult, no one at all drank, nor did we cuss or smoke or gamble.  There was no sexual cheating and none of we kids can remember sexual abuse.  Therefore we were respectable Scots-descent people.  But the sub-text was not like that.  In latency children sense everything and try to explain it all, but generally fail.

HOW TO BE A MARSHMALLOW

This is not really about marshmallows -- it’s about kids.  I’m drawing on a lecture by Laurence Steinberg, whose book “Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence” is hot right now.  I’ll put the link to one of his lectures at the bottom of this post.  In the meantime, you need to know about an experiment with little kids.  The small child was put at a table with a marshmallow in front of him and told that if he could sit there for ten minutes without eating that marshmallow, he could have two.  Then the adult left to watch through a one-way mirror.  Some kids just ate it right away.  Some waited but not long enough, and some did the job.  

Years passed.  The same kids were looked at again to see how they were coming along.  Those who could wait had done a LOT better than those who just ate the marshmallow.  There was nothing about a kid who had learned that if he didn’t take what was offered as soon as it was offered, it might disappear -- maybe through adult trickery or maybe because the adult would return and eat the marshmallow themselves -- nor were there any instances of the kid just throwing the marshmallow at the wall to remove the temptation.  Maybe throwing it on the floor and squashing it to scorn the whole idea of bribery.  So it was not a very sophisticated experiment, nor very -- um -- “literary” since there were so few narrative options.  And then there's the Martha Stewart angle: no marshmallow is worthy unless it is hand-made by experts.

Marshmallow handmade by Martha Stewart

Steinberg does better than that in some ways.  He says the four criteria for “success” in life (which I assume he defines as a secure and prosperous no-trouble life) are to graduate from high school, not to have children until marriage (as late as is possible), to never quit a job without lining up another one first, and not to break laws.  In short, to conform to expectations.  He also notes that merely starting college won’t be much of a help in getting a job, and anyway one-third of students drop out, presumably because they have no grit.  (Also, no money and mounting debt.)  Maybe no high school foundation for college level learning.  There is no mention of race.

Steinberg tears down high school to the ground.  He says other countries do FAR better, that high school in America is boring, repetitious, far too easy, and merely a sort of social club with a lot of extra-curricular sex and violence  because the schools are too prudish and chicken to take on “hot” topics with kids who are the size of adults.  The appetite for risk, exploration, novelty, the rush of learning new things is either limited to a lucky few (the football team IF they go to state) or maybe displaced to computers and social websites.  No thought of service to others.  It is separated from real learning, the opportunity to learn about social macros like poverty, ecological differences, foreign languages, war, politics, economics, and the other true dynamics of adult life.  The humanities are considered frills (Didn’t we settle that back in the Sixties?) and phys ed is unnecessary.  (Steinberg considers “mindfulness”, the management of one’s mind and emotions through yoga and so on, an important part of phys ed.  I agree.)  There is little about household management, esp. assets.

Like other aspects of great opportunity, the adolescent openness to risk and novelty -- supported by neurosystems still plastic and intense -- present many dangers.  The peak age for the onset of mental dysfunction is 14.  You are most likely to go crazy after you are ten, or before you are 25.  The peak age for accidents, but particularly drowning, is about the same.  Adolescents overreach, misjudge.  

These are mammal facts, true of animals that have adolescence -- which they all do.  They all are more easily addicted during that period, which means addiction is a matter of exposure rather than moral turpitude.  Having raised foxes, bobcats, and badgers as well as cats and dogs through their adolescence, I’ve seen their drive for more independence, which has evolved to take them to new territory instead of attaching them to the parental context.  They leave.  If they are prevented, the "wild" become hostile. Most domestic animals get in line.

Animals, even humans, are perhaps most lovable between the age when they can hold a crayon and when puberty begins.  Puberty is not the same as adolescence, but it is the kick-off shift that the adrenals fire up, part of which is prompting ovaries to release eggs.  We are aware that this is happening sooner than it did before, down to ages 7 and 8, before a female body is able -- even large enough -- to support a baby to a healthy outcome, before a uterus is fully developed.  14, the previously usual onset, is in a female an age at which they are nearly full-grown.  Also, adolescence at the older end is extended, but mostly because of economic and educational reasons.  

The three reasons suggested for early onset of adolescence are obesity (because fat is active, making hormones), environmental chemicals that disrupt sexual hormones, and artificial light.  Some go out of their way to specify light from computer or television screens.  All three of these are “associated” but no causal links are established -- only suggested.

Adolescents caught in war have shortened lives, but Steinberg says nothing about how it affects neural plasticity.  He DOES suggest that hypothalmic pituitary/adrenal relationship has something to do with it.  When I googled, I got http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4160346/   “Relational victimization, friendship, and adolescents’ hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis responses to an in vivo social stressor.”  As nearly as I can tell at a superficial glance, it is about how adolescents turn to each other for help and advice.  (See “Lisa Bright and Dark” for a vivid example.)  We’re well aware of this dynamic, the clustering of adolescents into sort of proto-families for reassurance and ideas.  If a high schooler has NO support group, or is ostracized, life can be terrifying.   But I don’t see stress or outright fear on the list of triggers for early onset puberty, despite the link to adrenaline.

Everyone reflects on their own adolescence.  Mine was indeed a time of enormous stress -- enough to rage at home but not at school.  (We expected an atomic bomb momentarily.)  Once I found the dramatics department, that was my refuge.  But looking back I’m astounded at how terrified I was of having low grades, how driven I was to stay safe by achieving without any clear idea of how to do it.  That’s probably been the through-line of my life.  I still pressure myself to turn out blog post essays (as thought still in school), but not to do housework or yardwork.  Most people here are wired in the opposite way: protecting the image of their home but trying not to be too flashy or a show-off, too "smart."

When it comes to the marshmallow test, I am full of grit.  I stay rigidly on my diabetes diet.  I throw the marshmallow against the wall.  Who are outsiders to judge, to decide whether I am a worthy human being, to grade my worthiness by how many minutes I can sit in a small room alone in front of sugar fluff.  Conformity is not grit.  Success is not conformity.  Grit is often about tolerating difference.  Success is often about being original.  Mental plasticity I can appreciate, but I don’t think marshmallows tell us much about plasticity.  They are merely sweet and squishy.

prize-winning "cute" cupcakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X03yPKazruw

Then watch this vid about Leonard Creo, who says, "If you can do puberty, you can do old age."

http://aeon.co/video/psychology/creo-a-short-film-about-a-90-year-old-athlete/