Mark Pine

A chorus of commentators has pegged the Aughts, the decade from January 1, 2000 to today, as the most tumultuous and disruptive since the 1960s. I agree. The eras resonate, not just in the big-picture of history, but for me personally. I came to adulthood in the Sixties, my children did so in the Aughts.

In the former period, we experienced the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. We had the civil rights movement, the urban riots, the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, psychedelic drugs and the cultural/sexual revolution. In this last decade, we had the disputed presidential election, 9/11, radical Islamic terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black president.

The decades are bookends to the careers of the Baby Boomers, among the most troublesome generations of American history. We came forward in the Sixties, taking our place in society and coming to occupy the positions of power and influence. We are now ending our time of hegemony.

We haven’t done good work. The two men of our generation who assumed the presidency, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, were disappointing. Both came to office promising worthwhile accomplishments, but their flaws of character surfaced while they held office and undermined their administrations.

In my view, that is what happened to the Boomer generation as a whole. We were raised to expect the world. Our parents had sacrificed, enduring the Depression and the Second World War: Their children would receive the blessings and bounties of the nation of the world most free, prosperous and powerful. In consequence, we grew up with a sense of almost limitless possibility and entitlement, reinforced in no small way by the mass media of television and later the Internet.

In our early years, we promised great things: peace, harmony, integration, health and wellbeing for everyone—the Age of Aquarius—and we upset the existing order to make things right.

But in our later years, as the limitations of reality came clear, we focused our entitlement and our intentions on the accumulation of wealth, power and excess. We created the bubbles of the Internet and housing, both of which burst badly. With our status as the only superpower and the reason provided by 9/11, under George W. Bush, we attempted to remake the world in our image with military force. We brought disruption and destruction to the rest of the world.

But although we Boomers came into our generational epoch with a sense of limitless horizons, we leave it now with one of diminishment. Our children, the Millennials, assume power with a more limited understanding of their role in the world. I think they see things more realistically and less self-centeredly than we did. They understand themselves as more connected and interdependent and less heroically than we.

I hope the Millennials will be more successful in accomplishing some of the changes for good that the Boomer generation intended but failed to bring about.

Ghrelin is the hormone that causes us to feel hunger. It’s secreted by our stomachs in to the blood stream and triggers a response in the hypothalamus, the appetite center of the brain. Ghrelin also causes stomach emptying. Perhaps that’s why the feeling of hunger is so often accompanied by the sensation of an empty stomach. Blood levels of the hormone decrease after a meal and rise by the next time to eat.

A new study shows that ghrelin may be the culprit in overeating, as well. Researchers at the UT Southwestern Medical Center found that mice given ghrelin strongly preferred being in a room where they had been given high fat food. In contrast, mice not given the hormone showed no preference for that chamber. In a second experiment, the ghrelin-primed mice struggled long and hard to poke their snouts through a narrow hole to eat a high-fat food pellet, but the control mice gave up quickly.

The experiments suggest that ghrelin may stimulate the craving for high-calorie food. The results could explain the behavior of people who continue to indulge long after becoming full, if either their hypothalamus was more sensitive to ghrelin or their blood levels of the hormone didn’t subside after a meal.

A second recent report points to another difficulty that obese people may experience losing weight. In order to achieve weight loss, it’s necessary reduce caloric intake below that prior to losing weight. But a commentary in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in November made the point that this “energy gap” gets larger with the amount of weight to lose.

For a 100 kg person to lose 10% of body weight, the energy gap should be about 200 kcal/day, but to lose 15%, the energy gap should be about 300 kcal/day. In contrast, once the weight is lost, the gap need be only 100 kcal/day to maintain weight loss. The writers noted that this means that losing a lot of weight requires major changes of behavior.

DHS has spent $40 billion on the aviation security system since 2001, according to an article today in the NY Times. The money pays for 45,000 screening officers and 1600 MRI machines.

Perhaps the money would have been spent better and more deaths prevented if the MRIs had been donated to hospitals and clinics.

The public reaction to the Christmas Day terrorist attempt has been huge. The cable news channels have done their round-the-clock routine since it happened. The TSA has instituted all sorts of additional inspections, rules, and procedures.

But one security expert, Bruce Schneier, provided a sensible perspective on all the hullaballoo last evening on the Rachel Maddow Show. He pointed out the futility of trying to prevent any and all potential terrorist tactics. In response to this last one, new security procedures restrict passenger movement and use of blankets in the last hour of the flight. … So the next time, a terrorist will just do his stuff under the covers at a different time during the flight.

Beyond that I think we must ask ourselves whether all the effort, expense, and inconvenience are really worth it. Between 2000 and 2007, according to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, 110 terrorist incidents occurred in the U.S. Excluding the 9/11 attacks, the incidents caused just 55 deaths and 33 injuries.

In contrast, 34,000 traffic accident deaths happened in 2008, of which about one-quarter were due to easily avoidable forms of distracted driving, like talking on cell phones or eating.

Our priorities are mixed up.

In the final analysis, there is no way we can continue to function as a free society, particularly in regard to traveling, and eliminate the terrorist threat completely. Which is more important to us: Being able to go where, when and how we want and accepting a low risk of harm—or being encumbered on travel by all sorts of procedures, restrictions, and breaches of our privacy?

Higher levels of leptin, the hormone secreted by the body’s fat cells, were associated with lower rates of developing Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), according to a study published this month in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers used the data of the Framingham Heart Study, the ongoing observational investigation of residents of Framingham, MA, which has been a goldmine of health information, since it began in 1948. About 800 subjects’ leptin levels were measured between 1990 and 1994. Those with higher leptin levels had a significantly lower risk of developing AD.

Leptin levels rise in proportion to body fat and to the amount of fat each cell holds. The hormone acts in the hypothalamus, where the brain’s appetite control center is located, to produce the sensation of satiety. But the hormone also enhances memory in animals with brain disease similar to AD by promoting the neuronal changes involved in memory formation.

Investigations of aging patients, such as this one in 2005, have found that loss of fat is associated with increased rates of developing AD, suggesting that lower leptin levels due to the weight loss might be connected with the risk for the disease.

On the other hand, a large study of 10,000 patients at Kaiser Permanente in California, found that obesity in midlife substantially increased the risk of Alzheimer’s in old age. It is thought that obese people may have reduced sensitivity to leptin, resulting in poor appetite control and less protection against AD.

The JAMA paper suggests the possibility of using leptin or a leptin-like drug as a treatment for AD. As of this time, there are no known medications that prevent the onset of the disease or significantly slow its progression. A disappointing article in the same issue of JAMA reported a negative result for tarenflurbil, a drug which reduces amyloid-β, the substance that accumulates in the brain in AD and is thought to cause the disease.

On Wednesday I wrote about the hard question of consciousness and the easy ones. The hard question asks how subjectivity can arise from material objects. Philosophers who discuss the problem use the term “qualia” to refer to the “introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.” In my view, a synonym for consciousness when thinking about subjectivity is “awareness.”

The term “consciousness” also comes up in inquiries about how consciousness works in the human brain. How is attention directed to a particular element of consciousness—a sensation, like a music tune, or an idea, like health care? We say we become conscious of something when we feel it or think about it.

The answers to these latter questions—the “easy” ones—make use of the brain’s wiring diagram. Hearing a tune will probably turn out involve neuronal activities in the auditory cortex and some other brain loci, as well as the axon trunks connecting those areas. Although it may require intricate and difficult technical and experimental achievements, there is no towering conceptual hurdle to jump to understand the mechanisms.

In contrast, I believe there will never be wiring-diagram answers to the hard question about subjectivity, for the reason that qualia and neurons are different kinds of things. But I don’t take a Cartesian-dualism view that mind and matter are separate universes. Rather, I think subjectivity (qualia and ideas) and objectivity (neurons and other material things) are two sides of one coin. But when we examine one side, we cannot hope to find answers by using concepts appropriate to the other side.

A similar duality exists in quantum mechanics. Everything that exists, according to QM, has a particle form and a wave form. But the duality of QM is also not of the Cartesian type. Rather particle and wave are two ways of describing something—anything. When you use one description, however, you can’t contaminate it with concepts from the other.

The particle description makes use of material things—matter and energy—like electrons, photons, and forces. The wave description (actually wave-function description) makes use of equations and probabilities—immaterial things. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM (the original and most widely held) holds that both the descriptions are valid. If you hold that particles (material things) exist, you must also accept that wave functions (immaterial things) exist.

In this way, the duality of QM (material particles and immaterial wave functions) parallels the philosophical duality of objective and subjective (material neurons and immaterial qualia). I believe that the particle descriptions apply to understanding the brain, but the wave descriptions apply to understanding consciousness.

Is this a distinction without a difference? Will it turn out that whatever the nature of consciousness, the scientific investigation of the phenomenon will focus on neurons and their connections? I think the scientific investigation of conscious will turn out to involve more than neurons (or computer chips, if machines eventually exhibit consciousness).

In response to my Wednesday post (also uploaded to the SciAm website), the article’s author kindly replied, “You’re right that I use ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ interchangeably, as do many people in the field. … Some researchers suggest that attention and consciousness are one and the same, in fact. A very interesting question.”

In my view, the word “awareness” points to the how the concept of consciousness differs from the concept of neuron. In contrast, the word “attention” points to operations of the neurons and the wiring diagram.

I think QM’s wave-function descriptions can more easily explain awareness than QM’s particle descriptions, which can more easily explain attention.

For one thing, wave functions and awareness are both immaterial mental phenomena. Like can better explain like.

A second thing is that wave functions better explain the integrated coherence of awareness. Whether one investigates the figure-ground alternation of images of the goblet-faces illustration or binocular rivalry experiments, what makes the phenomena remarkable isn’t that they involve the activities of neurons—but that the alternating percepts are coherent—taking one form, while excluding the other.

Wave functions behave this way. As wave function, an entity exists as a set of eigenvalues. When it is observed (in consciousness) it appears in the form of one eigenvalue or another of that set, but not both.

A third thing that wave functions explain better is the unity awareness. A conscious phenomenon is perceived as unified experience. With the wave function explanation it is easier to understand how a group of neurons can generate a unified percept.

In QM, when material objects interact with each other, the wave functions of the objects become entangled and combine into a single unified wave function. In the case of the interaction of a group of neurons, the wavefunctions of the neurons become entangled in a single wavefunction of the group. Thus, they can generate a unified conscious experience.

The Senate passed its version of the health care bill this morning at 7:05 a.m. But polls show most Americans oppose it. And generally, support for the health care proposals moving forward in Congress is down in almost all the polls. Here are several results:

• The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll for December: 45% say the country would be better off if the health care bill passes, down from 54% in November.
• The Washington Post poll for December 10-13. Those supporting the health care changes in Congress 44%, opposing 51%.
• The NBC-Wall Street Journal poll for December. Those who think Barack Obama’s health care plan is a good idea 32%, bad idea 47%. The poll has not shown a plurality of support for Obama’s plan since June.
• The Pew Research poll reported on December 16. Those who favor the health care proposals in Congress 35%, oppose 48%
• The CNN Opinion Research poll done December 16-20. Those who favor the Senate’s health care changes 42%, oppose 56%. Another question asked whether those in opposition feel so because the plan is “too liberal” 39%, “not liberal enough” 13%. Thus a majority of 55% either favors the changes or wants a more liberal bill.
• The George Washington U. Battleground Poll done December 6-9. Those who feel the country would benefit if the health care changes are enacted 49%, would not benefit 44%.

Besides being the only poll showing a plurality favoring enactment of the health care changes, the GWU poll also asked several other questions that help to explain the attitudes underlying the negative results:

• Who would better reform health care: Obama 48%, the GOP 40%.
• People who say they satisfied with health care they receive 91%, dissatisfied 9%
• A plurality 41% say that cost of health care is the highest priority health care issue. But 63% say Obama’s highest health care priority is to make sure everyone has health care, and 64% say Obama’s priority is different from theirs.
• 49% say major health care changes are needed, and 29% say minor changes are needed. Thus 78% favor some change in health care.
• 49% say the country would benefit if the changes underway are enacted. 44% say the country would not benefit. But only 39% say they and their family would benefit from the changes, while 51% say otherwise.

When you boil it down, right now Americans feel vast and deep perplexity about how the health care changes will turn out for them. I think Americans are behaving like the stock market indexes that drop when the traders are beset by uncertainty and anxiety. Americans feel their health care is vital to their wellbeing, just as the Wall Street crowd feels about stocks.

In this state of anxiety, most Americans are responding to polls asking them about the health care changes coming their way in the negative. Americans are especially worried whether the changes will cost them more money in this time of economic hardship.

But the situation will settle down and become clearer. In the next year and the following, the results of the new legislation will get put in place, and people will come understand how it will affect them.

In my view, support for the changes will rise substantially and steadily in the months ahead. The legislation will prohibit exclusions and caps on coverage and close the doughnut hole for seniors. There will be more choice of plans with the new health insurance exchanges.

The legislation will be seen as a win for Americans, and the positive views will grow.

In a Scientific American article online yesterday, “The Mechanics of Mind Reading,” the author, Daniel Bor, confuses two distinct meanings of the term consciousness. This happens often.

One meaning might be called the hard-question concept of consciousness and the other the easy-questions concept.

In one paragraph, Bor reports that Martin Monti, a brain sciences researcher at the University of Cambridge Medical School in the U.K., used an MRI scanner to demonstrate that a patient in a persistent vegetative state “was still conscious and could even communicate.” In this case conscious means having awareness, and indeed Bor uses that term as a synonym on the same sentence.

But in other paragraphs, he describes using fMRI scans for the purpose of studying:

how brain activity generates consciousness. If competing images are presented to each eye, using a technique called binocular rivalry, we consciously perceive only one image at a time, even though our eyes are viewing both images. … The pattern of primary visual cortex activity has little to with our conscious image, but instead reflects the raw input from the eyes. To uncover brain regions that actually do reflect consciousness, they found, you have to center on later, more complex visual regions.

In this case, Bor is writing about something that is better termed attention or focus, rather than consciousness. The brain function here is not awareness per se. Bor explains that the fMRI scan showed the primary visual cortex included all the visual data. But more complex visual regions attended to only one of two possible images.

Consider the famous illustration that alternately appears as a goblet in the center or two faces in profile along the sides. You can shift back and forth between the perceptions, but you can’t see both at the same time. It stretches the point, I think, to say that your consciousness, your awareness, encompasses only one. It’s better to say that you shift your focus or attention back and forth.

Perhaps this distinction is mere definition or semantics, but I think it’s more than that.

Bor’s first use of the term conscious—as synonymous with aware— points to what philosophers call the hard question of consciousness. It’s about subjectivity: How does the brain, a material organ, generate the immaterial contents of subjectivity—the redness of red, the sweet taste of watermelon, the rough feel of sandpaper?

Bor’s second use of the word—in regard to binocular rivalry—points to a relatively easy question, how does the brain attend to or focus on an aspect of that which is in awareness.

I would have a difficult time trying to answer the hard question, how the brain could generate subjectivity. But I think I can offer a reasonable guess right now what the answer to the easy question will turn out to be.

When viewing the goblet/faces illustration different parts of the brain light up on fMRI, depending on which image is being attended to. One area lights up when we see or think of things like goblets—glasses, cups, bowls, etc. A different region lights when we see faces—familiar faces, strange ones, men’s faces or women’s etc. The findings will be similar with binocular rivalry experiments.

Using an fMRI scanner to detect which image is in focus will be an amazing feat technically, but the fact that scientists will do it one day won’t be surprising.

Almost nobody is satisfied. Greenpeace called the agreement a “worse-than nothing-deal.” The Washington Post headlined, “Climate Deal Falls Short of Key Goals,” stating, “In fact, there was almost no deal in Copenhagen at all.”

By Saturday, the climate of the climate conference turned “funereal,” according to the NY Times, the negotiators “ashen faced.” That newspaper produced a sober assessment:

“Neither a grand success nor a complete meltdown….Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It produced instead a softer interim accord that, at least in principle, would curb greenhouses gases, provide ways to verify countries’ emissions, save rain forests, shield vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate change, and share the costs.

Only President Obama and the perpetually cheery U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the sponsor of the conference, put forward unequivocally positive opinions. An “unprecedented breakthrough,” the president proclaimed, and the secretary general hailed the agreement to provide $100 billion by 2020 from developed nations to poor ones for climate action in the Third World.

In my view, no commentator pointed to the most significant (and obvious) fact about the conference: the participation of the United States as committed player on the field to curb CO2 emissions and combat global warming.

During the long years of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, from the Kyoto accord in 1997 until the Obama Administration took office this year, the world had grown accustomed to America on the sidelines. The U.S. not only sat it out, but under Bush, it played against the environmental team. That gave every other nation a reason and an excuse to do nothing, although some, like the Europeans, tried.

Even after Obama became president, I think, the nations of the world took no account of a change. Rather the world waited to see what position the U.S. would take. In the lead up to Copenhagen, I suspect, no major nation made a major commitment. None came with the intention to bargain hard and seriously compromise. Instead there was a lot of talk, while everyone waited for the new president to make his appearance at the big meeting.

It should be no surprise, then, that once the conference got underway, no nations were prepared to come to agreement.

Tom Friedman, the Times columnist, expressed skepticism: “This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need.” He recommended that the U.S. strike out on its own, leading a world that would follow our lead. As he often does, Friedman made the case for the great economic rewards to be gained by the country that is “first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth.”

Friedman is right about the role American should play. But he’s wrong about the conference. It was the world stage on which President Obama made it clear that the U.S. is a serious and committed player. Now that the representatives of the other nations have gone home, they will talk to their leaders and their people, and they will tell them, “America is in the game, so we had better get going, too.”

The telephone call was tragic and ironic. George, the caller in Bangor Maine, is a 54-year-old man, chronically ill and disabled. He spoke on this morning’s Washington Journal, C-SPAN’s public affairs call-in show.

By his description of himself, he suffers from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD. Unable to work, he lives “on my couch” burdened by disease between episodes of gasping for breath when he calls an ambulance and gets taken to the ER for ventilation, medication and stabilization, and then sent home to wait for the next time.

He blamed himself for his desperate trouble—30 years of smoking, he said. And he called to warn all America about the danger of the health care bill that passed a crucial vote in the Senate last night. If health reform passes, he implied, the country would encumber itself with taking care of people like him:

This country is bankrupt. The people to get what they want right now are selling their own children into soup lines ten or fifteen years down the road. I’m disabled, I’m on disability, I’m getting Social Security…. I’ve cost hospitals around this country over $100,000 because nobody would give me insurance because I have a lung condition.

The nation would bear the cost of people like him, if health reform passed, he said.

The country would have been better off if they had just let me die long ago. Of course I’m too coward to just lay here and let myself die.

And so each time he couldn’t take it any longer, he called for help and got raced to the hospital for emergency treatment.

Bill Scanlan, the C-SPAN host, asked him one question before the call terminated:

Bill: So, George, you have no health insurance at all?

George: No, They tell me I’ll be able to get Medicare next year.

The man doesn’t see that his words actually plead like no other words could for passage of the health care bill that moved forward last night.

He WOULD have had insurance, if that bill had been law during the years when he was rushed to hospitals and cost them thousands to treat his condition on an emergency basis. He COULD have seen a doctor regularly. His condition could have been stabilized at home. Possibly, advised by a personal physician, he would have gotten effective treatment to quit smoking.

But he is so full of anger and blame toward himself, he doesn’t understand that If health care reform had passed long ago, in all likelihood, he would not now suffer as he does. He is a glaring example of the need for the change that the Congress is now enacting.

And the most ironic part: He would have cost those hospitals less, not more, if the system of health care he is warning against had had him in its care.

Late last month, Science magazine published a remarkable article on genetic programming of the spatial configuration of the body. Howard Y. Chang of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University laid out some of the mechanisms by which genes map the body and control its shape.

The genes are those in the regions of the chromosomes known as the HOX loci. Subsections of HOX (A, B, C, and D) correspond to axes of the body. HOXC genes specify position on the anterior-posterior axis (head to foot); HOXA and HOXD genes specify position on the proximal-distal axis of the limbs (near the trunk to far from it); HOXB genes specify position of the cells of internal organs.

A cell of a finger knows it place in the body according to which of two of three groups of genes is turned on or turned off. The genes that are turned on control the synthesis of proteins that build that cell, so that it fits into its particular location in the body’s “geography.”

Chang writes that a cell’s HOX genes function as a kind of corporal GPS device: The activity of the genes corresponds to the position of that cell on a map, like coordinates of longitude and latitude, except that the axes are anterior-posterior and proximal-distal. In the case of a finger cell, for example, the activity of the cell’s HOXA, HOXC and HOXD genes simultaneously regulate the proteins appropriate for a cell in that part of the body.

An excellent illustration in the article shows how the HOX GPS device works. The DNA of the HOX loci (like that of all the chromosomes) is wrapped like a thread around spools of protein called histones. When a gene is turned on, its region of the thread is unspooled, so that a loop of DNA extends out from its chromosome. RNA polymerase attaches to the loop and transcribes its DNA for building particular proteins and molecules that regulate transcription.

The article explains that the position of unspooled, activated genes along the length of HOX locus corresponds to the position of the cell along the axes of body geography. This is how the GPS mechanism functions.

Chang writes:

Like a map based on longitudes and latitudes, cells reflect their anatomic origin by a digital combination of gene activities based on positional identity of cardinal axes from development. Indeed, position-specific gene expression programs are directly controlled by Hox proteins, which mediate anatomic-specific inductive effects.

In other words, the set of HOX genes of a finger cell activate certain genes and deactivate others, and in that manner direct (induce) the building an appropriate set of proteins for that particular cell.

One of the most wonderful aspects of biology, I think, is that the mechanisms by which organisms function often turn out to be rather mechanical. They are comprehensible in a kind of nuts-and-bolts picture showing how things work.

The next article following Chang’s in that issue of Science describes the proteins actin and myosin, which are involved in cell shape and movement. A nice illustration in that piece shows the myosin molecule literally crawling along the length of an actin molecule. Perhaps I’ll post about that next.