Hearts beating in unison

A group of Finish psychologists report that heart rates synchronize during a religious ritual in Spain.  Heart rates rose and fell together for people who walk on hot coals and their relatives in the audience who watched them.
Science Times article     PNAS research article

Synchronization of biorhythms has been reported in other contexts as well, but it is not clear why this would happen, or how two separate metabolisms communicate.

I have had success with the following experiment: place a finger on a friend’s pulse as he places a finger on yours.  Each of you vocalize or tap the other each time you feel a heartbeat.  If your two heart rates are not too dissimilar, you may find your heart rates fall into synchrony.

How does this work?  At the very least, it indicates that we have much finer control over our autonomic nervous system than we generally acknowledge.  Beyond this, heart synchrony may be classed with other evidence that biological systems have channels of communication that physics has yet to identify.

Of butterflies and bees

Listen to Evgeny Petrov play these two virtuoso encores (each under 2 minutes long),
The Bee by Schubert and The Butterfly by Alexander Ilynsky (1859-1920)

Thinking about thought

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

— David Hume, born 300 years old today, was a child of the Enlightenment who early foresaw the limits of reason.

The way Hume saw it, our brief lives, crowned by unavoidable death, are unlikely to put us in touch with any grand absolutes. On the other hand, the human mind is an indubitably powerful tool and its powers of reasoning have penetrated many an enigma. Hume was as amazed by human knowledge as the next guy. He simply wanted us to be honest about its failings and limitations. Most of the things we know come from observing what happens around us and making the reasonable inference that what happens one day will continue to happen the next. The sun will rise, dropped objects will fall, harsh words will bite, etc. We don’t know the greater ‘why’ of such things, suggested Hume, and there is no reason to think we ever will.
...
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a discussion between an all-around skeptic, Philo; a religious dogmatist and believer in abstract reason named Demea; and a moderate empiricist, Cleanthes. The three characters debate the existence of God and other light topics. Scholars have long debated the question as to which of the interlocutors represents Hume’s true position. The answer is that none of them do, and all of them do. Hume was fully reconciled to being bifurcated, trifurcated even, if we can put it that way. He tried to love the war that was always raging inside. In this, he was an honest philosopher, and an honest man.
—Morgan Meis

“What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought’.”

What to study

The greatest scientific question of our age is whether biology incorporates physics that is yet undiscovered.

Evidence for this might include telepathy and clairvoyance, animal navigation, and (my favorite) the link between cell phones and cancer. 

Physicists know that there are fundamental laws of physics yet to be discovered.  Our understanding of gravity is not consistent with our understanding of quantum mechanics.  The Big Bang theory can only be made to work if our world is imbued with stuff that has never been detected in any physics experiment, and there’s 20 times as much of it as there is of ‘ordinary matter’.

It is good scientific practice to look first for explanations of any biological phenomenon within known physics.  It is bad scientific practice to deny categorically that new physics could be involved.

Quantum entanglement is an in-between case: it is not fundamentally new physics, but it is unknown in macroscopic systems at room temperature.  Physicists know just how powerful a quantum computer will be, when we learn how to make them.  Could it be that evolution scooped us by a billion years?

Those who wish to embody the Tao should embrace all things. To embrace all things means first that one holds no anger or resistance toward any idea or thing, living or dead, formed or formless. Acceptance is the very essence of the Tao. To embrace all things means also that one rids oneself of any concept of separation; male and female, self and other, life and death. Division is contrary to the nature of the Tao. Foregoing antagonism and separation, one enters in the harmonious oneness of all things.

— Lao Tzu, fr the Hua Hu Jing, tr Brian Walker

To Twilight

Linger, we pray,
Shy mother of the white and earliest star!
For in thy keeping are
The Dreams that suffer not the light of day—
Dim presences, that find us from afar.

O soundless feet,
Between the night and sunset hesitant !
The cricket’s eager chant
And voice of some faint bell, remotely sweet,
Alone await thee, clear and consonant.

Sing to thyself
A song as pure, as low, as delicate,
Ere music seem too late,
Or yet the moonray seek the hidden elf,
Or mute, the night fall un compassionate.

We shall not hear;
But in the heart an echo swiftly flown
Shall touch us from thine own,
And voices of the past, forlorn and clear,
Shall haunt us from, the days that love has known. . . .

So hast thou come,
Whose benediction ceases not for night,
To close the gates of light,
And tell, from fields for thee a moment dumb,
That age-old pain, of Beauty and her flight.

— George Sterling

As close as two humans can be

We take it for granted that Siamese twins would separate if they could choose...“You have a right to be alone, to be individuals alone, in your own body alone, determining your own destiny, alone.” Isn’t this the very definition of a free self, the knowledge that you can always extract yourself from another? Yet, if you ask conjoined twins, most seem quite comfortable with their shared bond. “We’d never agree to an operation,” Dasha Krivoshlyapova told the BBC. “We just don’t need it.” “Even when we were little we didn’t want one,” said Masha Krivoshlyapova. “We are a little collective.”

This last sentiment is simultaneously adorable and horrifying. For what would it mean to turn our lives into a “little collective,” to permanently, inextricably attach our fate to another’s and always experience our lives in terms of another? Would it not make us unsure where our own “self” began and ended, unsure that we were the tellers of our own jokes, the designers of our own hopes, the caretakers of our own needs? How could we accept thinking of “me” as “us,” accept being unfree? In other words, what we see, and fear, in Chang and Eng is love.

— Read the rest of Stephany Anne Golberg’s article.
Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, were born 200 years ago this month.

People helping people

WikiHow is an uncredentialed compendium of advice and experience.  Despite infiltration by commercial interests, it contains a trove of diverse and useful suggestions.

Nestled among practical articles about How to Make a Compost Pile, How to Write a Press Release and How to French Kiss is wisdom about How to Overcome Fear of Death.

Greatest mistake in human history: agriculture

Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, ‘Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’

And time devoted to clothing and shelter is negligible.  In comparison, the average American works 30 hours a week just to cover basic needs, and that doesn’t include commuting time.

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients... It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. 

— Jared Diamond
  (writing 25 years ago)

William Bolcom’s Ghosts

Humor is one of the best talents of composer William Bolcom, born this day in 1938.  Here are a few YouTube selections:

Poltergeist     
The Serpent’s Kiss
The Graceful Ghost, performed by 12-year-old Anthony P.

Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.

— Paul Brunton

‘He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.’

Sometimes democracy works

On Saturday, 200,000 Germans protested against nuclear power, 100,000 in Berlin alone.  This was the largest of a wave of public demonstrations that have gone on all spring, since the Fukushima disaster.

On Monday, the Chancellor reversed her stance and announced that Germany would be phasing out its existing nuclear power plants, and canceling all new ones.

Huffington Post article by Tina Gerhardt