• The Science of Gratitude - Issue 30 : Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-science-of-gratitude-rp

    I conducted an early Thanksgiving experiment on myself. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on a lecture trip. My morning was free, and I took it to write two pages about how lucky I am—something, I’m embarrassed to say, that I had never done before. Here is one thing I wrote: “I’m looking out at a sky that Vikings would have seen. I get to do this—me.” Writing it all down felt very good. I didn’t know it then, but in making such a list, I was engaging in a scientifically based gratitude intervention, the sort that has been shown, in experimental studies, to make you an all-around happier and more sociable person. Since the year 2000, psychological research has tied gratitude to a host of benefits: the tendency to feel more hopeful and optimistic about one’s own future, better coping mechanisms for (...)

  • How Your Embryo Knew What To Do - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-your-embryo-knew-what-to-do

    This was the moment Hilde Proescholdt had been waiting for. Peering through her bench-top microscope in 1921, she beheld the soft mass of a salamander embryo. Fertilized two days earlier, the developing creature, no larger than a grain of sand, was now a hollow sphere of thousands of mostly uniform cells. One clump, however, had started to migrate inward, toward the center of the sphere, and Proescholdt saw that it had formed a dimple, like the impression left by a finger pressed into an inflated balloon. Delicately, as a surgeon wields a scalpel, she guided a fine glass needle through the embryo, carving away the dimple, known as the dorsal lip. With a micropipette, she added the excised cells to a young embryo of a different salamander species, at a site opposite its own dorsal (...)

  • Why We’re Patriotic - Issue 30 : Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/why-were-patriotic

    It started with one man quietly sipping a Tom Collins in the lounge car of the Cleveland-bound train. “God bless America,” he sang, “land that I love …” It didn’t take long. Others joined in. “Stand beside her … and guide her ...” Soon the entire train car had taken up the melody, belting out the patriotic song at the top of their lungs. It was 1940 and such spontaneous outpourings, this one described in a letter to the song’s creator Irving Berlin, were not unusual. That was the year the simple, 32-bar arrangement was somehow absorbed into the fabric of American culture, finding its way into American Legion halls, churches and synagogues, schools, and even a Louisville, Kentucky, insurance office, where the song reportedly sprang to the lips of the entire sales staff one day. The song has (...)

  • Identity Is an Inside Joke - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/identity-is-an-inside-joke

    I got one for you: It’s 1990, and there’s this group of 27 people who go to a six-week law enforcement leadership course in Ottawa. The first day, the newly elected class president announces that at the start of class each day, he wants someone to tell a joke. The president is from Newfoundland, and so he leads by example—basically, a Newfoundlander finds a genie in a bottle and is granted two wishes. His first wish is to be on a beach on Tahiti, which the genie grants immediately. For his second wish, he says, “I don’t want to work no more.” Instantly, he finds himself on the streets of Sydney, Nova Scotia, a town known among Canadians for its high rate of unemployment. Everybody laughs. This is a pretty funny joke. This is also a good move by the Newfie class president. These people come (...)

  • Is Farmed Salmon Really Salmon? - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/is-farmed-salmon-really-salmon

    The fish market has become the site of an ontological crisis. Detailed labels inform us where each fillet is from or how it was caught or whether it was farmed or wild-caught. Although we can now tell the farmed salmon from the wild, the degree of differences or similarities between the two defies straightforward labels. When a fish—or any animal—is removed from its wild habitat and domesticated over generations for human consumption, it changes—both the fish and our perception of it. The farmed and wild both say “salmon” on their labels, but are they both equally “salmon?” When does the label no longer apply? This crisis of identity is ours to sort out; not the fish’s. For us, the salmon is an icon of the wild, braving thousand-mile treks through rivers and oceans, leaping up waterfalls to (...)

  • How Burgers and Fries Are Killing Your Microbial Balance
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

    So a remarkable and somewhat quixotic effort has begun to catalog and possibly preserve, before they disappear, the #microbes of people who live in environments thought to resemble humanity’s past—people whose #microbiomes may approximate an ancestral state. Researchers are motoring down rivers in the Amazon, off-roading in the East African savanna, hiking into the mountain villages of Papua New Guinea. They see themselves as rushing to catalog an ecosystem that may soon disappear.

    “It’s really our last chance to harvest a lot of these microbes from around the world,” Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “We have to do it before it’s too late—and it’s very nearly too late.”

    He and others suspect these populations won’t retain their traditional ways much longer. Antibiotics, thought to deplete microbes, are already used frequently in some communities. And as modernization and acculturation progresses—as these peoples move toward the sanitized, indoor-dwelling, junk food-eating reality that characterizes much life in developed nations today—some human microbes, or perhaps certain configurations of those microbes, may be lost forever.

    For now, scientists are careful to characterize the quest as purely descriptive; they want to know how these human microbiomes affect our bodies. Yet a kind of microbial ark—a storage vault for potentially endangered human microbes—is perhaps implied. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University and Dominguez-Bello’s husband, argues that because Westernized peoples may have lost important microbes, we may have to repopulate ourselves with microbes derived from more traditional-living populations—from, say, Amazonian Amerindians or African hunter-gatherers.

    #microbiote #alimentation

  • Quantum Mechanics Is Putting Human Identity on Trial - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/quantum-mechanics-is-putting-human-identity-on-trial

    “Even in principle, one cannot demand an alibi of an electron!”Hermann Weyl, The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics (1950) Have you ever heard the story of Martin Guerre? He lived with his bride and newborn son in Artigat, a small village in the Pyrenees foothills of Southwestern France. In 1548, at the age of 24, after being accused by his own parents of theft, Martin Guerre disappeared, leaving his family behind. Eight years later, after his parents had passed away, Guerre returned home, reuniting with his wife, son, and fellow villagers. Over the next three years, Guerre and his wife, Bertrande, had two more children. All was going swimmingly until a foreign soldier came through town and claimed that the man who had returned was not the real Martin Guerre, but an imposter named (...)

  • What Happens When You Can’t Talk to Yourself? - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/what-happens-when-you-cant-talk-to-yourself

    Silence:Phillips participates in an aphasia communication workshop in Speechless, a documentary by Guillermo F. Flórez that profiles people with the condition.Guillermo F. Flórez What would you do if you lost your inner monologue? You know, the one where you tell yourself “I don’t want to get up yet,” or “This is one delicious burger.” That’s what happened to Tinna Geula Phillips. In 1997, Phillips suffered a massive stroke, which left her without the ability to communicate in any meaningful way. She went from being fluent in six different languages to virtually mute. “I cried inside, because I cannot communicate. My mom, others, Chinese! I don’t know. Is not communicate, nothing. I, six languages, gone!” Phillips has aphasia, from the Ancient Greek “without speech.” Typically, aphasia occurs (...)

  • The Man Who Used Facebook to Find an Extinct Human Species - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-man-who-used-facebook-to-find-an-extinct-human-species

    In some sense, Lee Rogers Berger found himself and the drowning woman at the same time. The Georgia native had just returned home after dropping out of Vanderbilt University, where terrible grades in his pre-law major and straight As in his electives had convinced him that he was ill-suited to law but well-suited to something else. For the time being, that something else was covering local news as a photographer. One night, Berger was reporting from the banks of the Savannah River on a woman’s disappearance when he spotted something in his peripheral vision. He dropped his camera onto the ground, himself into the river, became the hero of the day, and discovered an uncanny talent: being in the right place at the right time. Decades later, he pulled a similar trick with his career. (...)

  • Science Is Proving That Tragic Curses Are Real - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/science-is-proving-that-tragic-curses-are-real

    In the first lines of Sophocles’ Antigone, the title character bemoans her fate to the chorus: How many miseries our father caused!And is there one of them that does not fallOn us while yet we live? Antigone must reckon with the choices her father Oedipus made and the slippery, obscure moral inheritance that he leaves her. She ultimately chooses to pay with her life, not for her sins, but for her father’s. Children reckoning with and reenacting the sins of their forebears is a key part of the tragic form. The great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—incorporated ancestral fault into their works, as Orestes, Electra, and Antigone reap what their powerful but monumentally flawed parents sow. The Greeks took the idea of moral inheritance well past the stage, weaving it into the (...)

  • At Home in the Liminal World - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/at-home-in-the-liminal-world-rp

    When Ruth Behar moved from Cuba to Israel and then to a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, in 1962, she was shunted into the “dumb class.” There she met another challenged student, Shotaro, from Japan. Together the two friends, age 6, helped each other learn English while inhabiting what Behar, now a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, calls the “liminal space,” that in-between place where what has been is no more and what will be is not yet. Behar found that to pass from one culture to another, to traverse the chasm of the liminal, language was the bridge. As she mastered English, she was able to help her parents navigate a new country and achieve success herself in school. “I think, dream, and live much of my life in the English language,” Behar (...)

  • Ingenious: Walter Murch - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/ingenious-walter-murch

    In the 1990s, during breaks from editing the film First Knight, starring Sean Connery, Walter Murch was reading The Sleepwalkers, a book on the history of cosmology, by the Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler. Murch was struck by a footnote to a passage about Pythagoras and numerology that mentioned “Bode’s law,” formulated in the 18th century, which holds that planets and moons orbit their hosts at predictable mathematical ratios. “The idea made me go ‘Hmmm,’ ” Murch says. “It percolated in my mind for the next six months or so and then for some reason it moved to the front of my agenda.” It has remained there ever since. Murch may be the world’s most vocal proponent of Bode’s law, also known as the Titius-Bode law, named after its two founders, and what it might say about the identity of (...)

  • How I Tried to Transplant the Musical Heart of Apocalypse Now - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-i-tried-to-transplant-the-musical-heart-of-apocalypse-now

    In 1979, sometime during the barely controlled chaos of the last months of finishing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, someone in legal affairs had the presence of mind to ask if we had secured the rights to use the 1965 Georg Solti recording of the “Ride of the Valkyries,” the music which accompanied Colonel Kilgore’s attack on the Vietnamese village of Vin Drin Dop, otherwise known as Charlie’s Point. The idea of blasting music from Wagner’s opera Die Walküre as a form of PsyWarOp (Psychological Warfare Operations) to terrify the Vietnamese had originated deep in the neuronal labyrinth of John Milius’s mind in 1969, when he was writing the original screenplay for Apocalypse Now. View Video “That Valkyrie scene came from a vision I had of the exhilaration of war—right alongside the (...)

  • How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

    For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber. Scientists (...)

  • Blowing Off the Grid - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/blowing-off-the-grid

    The story began with Svend Auken, our brave Minister for the Environment,” says Soren Hermansen, who runs the Energy Academy on the Danish island of Samsø, an emerald comma in the Kattegat Sea. “When he returned from the United Nations climate change conference in 1997, he announced, ‘Now we need to start the green revolution in Denmark.’ That was very brave and very crazy.” To get people excited about the idea, Auken set up a competition between municipalities for the best plan for going carbon-neutral in 10 years. When Samsø won, it became Denmark’s “renewable-energy island.” Hermansen, then a teacher, rock musician, and self-described rabble-rouser, took it upon himself to see that his native island lived up to its new name.He brought consultants—and beer—to community meetings to (...)

  • The Science Hidden In Your Town Name - Issue 30 : Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-science-hidden-in-your-town-name

    Unusually heavy winter rains have flooded the town of Chertsey, west of London, twice in the past three years. Only its old center—a raised plot on the bank of the River Thames where Anglo-Saxon monks built an abbey in the seventh century—has remained consistently dry. For most residents, the rising waters, often stinking with sewage, have come as an unwelcome surprise after centuries of a relatively dry, stable climate. They seem to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, this telling fact about the place they call home: In Old English, Chertsey means “Ceorot’s island.” The name harkens back to the Early Medieval Period, when Germanic tribes began to settle, and name, many of the places dotting maps of modern Britain. Back then, water was ubiquitous. Sediment deposits dating to this era (...)

  • The Strange Persistence of First Languages - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/the-strange-persistence-of-first-languages

    Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument. It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time. Now my dad was shrugging at me from beyond— “You see, (...)

  • How to Solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever - Issue 30: Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-to-solve-the-hardest-logic-puzzle-ever

    While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one of these visits, he met a “very charming lady musician” and, on their first date, Smullyan, an incorrigible flirt, proceeded very logically—and sneakily. “Would you please do me a favor?” he asked her. “I am to make a statement. If the statement is true, would you give me your autograph?” Content to play along, she replied, “I don’t see why not.” “If the statement is false,” he went on, “you don’t give me your autograph.” “Alright …” His statement was: “You’ll give me neither your autograph nor a kiss.” It takes a moment, but the cleverness of Smullyan’s ploy eventually becomes clear. A truthful statement gets him her (...)

  • Drums, Lies, and Audiotape - Issue 30 : Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/drums-lies-and-audiotape

    My wife Ingrid and I had been in Aburi, Ghana for just over a week when our host, Kwame Obeng, informed me that I’d be joining the royal drummers for a performance at the chief’s palace the following afternoon, in celebration of an important holy day. It’s not as if I was unprepared. I’d first met Obeng three years earlier, when he came to Toronto to coach a drumming troupe made up of Ghanaian immigrants and a lone Westerner (myself). We became close: Obeng called me mi nua, or “my brother,” in Twi, the language of his ethnic group, the Akan. And when his visa expired after a year, he invited me to continue studying with him back home in Aburi, a small town nestled in the verdant Akuapem Hills. Two years later, I took him up on his invitation. And now it was time to show him what I could (...)

  • What’s Your Story ? - Issue 30 : Identity
    http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/whats-your-story

    We’re all stories in the end.— “ In 2003, author James Frey published a bestselling autobiographical memoir, A Million Little Pieces, purportedly detailing his struggle to overcome addiction. Nearly three years later, during a riveting appearance on Oprah, he admitted that several supposedly factual details had been embellished or fabricated. All later editions of the book included a note from Frey, admitting his embellishments but claiming that his primary mistake had been “writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” It was an interesting choice of words, given the role story plays in personal identity. Deep down, we are all raconteurs, drawing on past memories and weaving them into a coherent narrative to construct (...)