Tag Archives: science

Knowing and Mystery walked into a bar…

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The Curse Of Certainty In Science And Religion : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR.

Thought-provoking essay on an NPR blog (Cosmos and Culture) by Adam Frank about the only constant in life being change, and how we hunger for certainty, solidity, knowing.

Religions try to provide certainty:

Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order.

Science might seem the antidote to the constrictions of religion:

Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known.

But:

When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it … becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.

So how about “spiritual but not necessarily religious”?

The world’s history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life… Dig around in most of the world’s great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.

For science, embracing uncertainty means…

… embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do. It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.

So how can we live with so much uncertainty? We become patient, forgiving, generous, and inclusive. We find humor, good will, and compassion.

We embrace the mystery of ourselves and these lives we live. A little humility goes far.

I like knowing, or rather, believing I know. I’ve spent much of my life wanting to know, trying to know, believing if I just knew, then … I’d be protected from misfortune, or something like that.

Misfortune happened anyway.

Yet can I really know? Can I really know you? Can I really know truth? Can I even really know myself? No, I cannot.

I operate on assumptions that involve temporary (fictional) certainties. I cling to certainty from moment to moment as I go about my life, taking this-that-the other for granted, and it could all change in any given moment. Yes, tomorrow will come. Yes, I’m going to take that trip, do that thing in the future. I’m going to arrive safely on the other side of the street. I’m going to get home again. I’m going to be emotionally intact at the end of the day. I will see the people who have been important to me again.

And I don’t really know.

Knowing is a convenient truth that works better for me when I understand that it is always accompanied by something much bigger and more powerful, The Mystery. This is the sea of the Nagual.

Science discovers how massage affects cells after exercise

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I love it when science deepens our understanding of something people know from experience to be true. The latest such finding to catch my eye is in my own field, massage therapy. People love massage and not all that much is actually known about how it affects the body’s systems or its long-term benefits.

Canadian scientists studied what actually happens at the cellular level when someone who has vigorously exercised gets a massage. Here’s an article explaining the study, and here’s the abstract for the research findings.

In short, massage applied to muscles after vigorous exercise reduces inflammation and promotes growth of energy-producing units (mitochondria) in muscle cells.

“The potential benefits of massage could be useful to a broad spectrum of individuals including the elderly, those suffering from musculoskeletal injuries and patients with chronic inflammatory disease,” said Tarnopolsky. “This study provides evidence that manipulative therapies, such as massage, may be justifiable in medical practice.”

The researchers also busted the myth that massage reduces lactic acid, which builds up in cells during exercise and has been thought to contribute to muscle pain. Massage had no effect on lactic acid build-up.

Here’s something to look forward to:

One future research direction will be to examine the long-term effect of massage after a workout.

 

The left brain right brain crossover

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A question arose the other day that I’m researching. We’ve all heard that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right brain controls the left side of the body.

Somewhere there is a crossover mechanism.

Assuming the crossover is located somewhere in the brain, where in the brain does this crossover take place?

I wondered if it specifically affected our eyes and ears. Is the left eye connected to the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere? Eyes and ears are so close to the brain and intimately connected to brain centers for processing images and sounds, I wondered if they were affected. Perhaps the crossover occurred beneath these brain centers…

So I googled left brain right brain crossover.

I found a site that explains how the eyes cross over. James Crook points out that when looking straight ahead, light from the right side of the visual field hits the left side of the retina in both eyes.

So it’s not like each eye corresponds to one hemisphere, either left or right. Both eyes feed visual information to both hemispheres. Our eyes are on the front of our heads, and we see stereoscopically.

The information from each eye comes together in the optic chiasma a few centimeters behind the eyes, where nerve bundles from each eye converge and then separate, going to the occipital lobe, so named because it’s near the occiput, the plate in the skull with a large hole through which the brain narrows into the spinal cord.

That bone at the back of your head that sticks out the most? That’s your occiput, and your occipital lobe is just inside.

In the optic chiasma, 45 percent of the nerve fibers from each eye cross over to the other side.

Crook states:

The two nerve trunks which leave the optic chiasma carry respectively signals from the left of each eye to the left, and from the right of each eye to the right. Because the image on the retina was left-right reversed, the nerve trunk traveling to the left side of the brain carries information about the right field of view, and the nerve trunk to the right carries information about the left field of view.

Click the link above to view the image, and all will be clear!

Elsewhere I read that the crossover from the body to the brain occurs where the nerves enter the brain. In other words, at or near the occiput.

So there’s a crossover for the eyes (the optic chiasma) and a crossover for the body (somewhere near the occiput). I hadn’t suspected there were multiple crossovers!

Now my left brain is tired! To be continued…