WAKE UP CALL

A few days back,a college-mate of mine,Dr.Ashis Baran Saha had sent an email to natmedicos_87,the web forum for the interaction of the college-batch of medicos to which I belong.The mail revealed a series of photographs of a day in Feroe Island,a Danish coastal town where the locals hunt down Calderon dolphins as an annual event of celebration. The graphic photos were nauseating to say the least,showing the sea-waves stained red with the innocent blood of the hunted which lay sprawled along the sea-shore and offering a unique exhibition - trophies,bringing about the joy of victory to the hunters,as revealed by the facial expressions of those who participate in the brutal exercise,reportedly celebrating the "manliness" the local teens achieve.
As one of my batch-mates remarked over the photos that where animals hunt for need,man hunt for greed,I couldn't help but recoil from the sickening sensation that overwhelmed me(and all my batch-mates too)with a thought which continues to disturb my inner peace to the day,that the civilized man is undoubtedly the most cruel,sadistic and pervert animal that ever existed on our planet.

While my wife (and my batch-mates too)continue to whine in a harmlessly light and jocular tone,over the alleged fact that I choose to ponder over issues that are chronically morose shaded in negativity,I cannot help but express my helplessness about committing this aesthetic crime again and again.The very history of civilized man continue to pursue me to the limits of dispair.And the history of needless war,terrorism and genocides,of raping Nature again and again without remorse,wiping her innocent virgin beauty off the face of our planet,seem to continue comfortably into the future.

One of the ugliest crimes man has committed is harnessing the unbound energy of nature to make a radio-active bomb out of it which he unleashed upon his own fraternity in Japan,on 6th.August 1945.And by continuing to develop an arsenal of thermo-nuclear weapon in the decades to follow,man has shown that he has not felt guilty of any crime,and is ready to repeat it without remorse if provocated to sensitive stretches.

There is no such concept called a nuclear war.Today if one nuclear weapon were to be unleashed,it would lead to a nuclear Holocaust.The perceptions of objective consequences of a war and a holocaust are significantly and grossly different,to say the least,and it is important that the men in power,the men rolling desperate dices recognize this.The dichotomy lies in the fact that every thinking person in grips with sanity fears a nuclear showdown,and every technological state plans for it.Everyone knows it is Madness,and every nation has an Excuse.There has developed a dreary chain of causality:The Germans were working on the nuclear bomb at the beginning of World War II;so the Americans had to make one first.If the Americans had one,the Soviets had to have one,and then the British,the French,the Chinese,the Indians,the Pakistanis...By the end of the last century,nuclear weapons had become almost a home handicraft industry.

The conventional bombs of World War II were called Blockbusters - filled with 20 tonnes of TNT,they could destroy a city block.All the bombs dropped on all the cities amounted to some 20 million tonnes,2 megatons,of TNT-Coventry and Rotterdam,Dresden and Tokyo,all the deaths that showered from the grey skies between 1939 and 1945 were 2 megatons.By the end of the 20th.century,2 megatons was the energy released in the explosion of a single,more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb-one bomb with the destructive force of the Second World War.But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.By the late 1980s,the strategic missile and bomber forces of the USSR and the USA were reportedly aiming at 15000 designated targets.

No place on the planet is actually safe. The energy contained in these weapons,Sinister Genies of Death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps,was far more than 10,000 megatons,but with the apocalyptic power of destruction now concentrated efficiently,not over 6 years that spanned the last World War but over 6 hours,a Blockbuster for every single family on the planet,a World War II re-enacted with every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.

We are inhabitants of Planet Earth.So is a venomous cobra,and so is a blade of grass freshly bathed in the dew of this early morning when I am writing these lines,snugly closetted in my own little den.We have all been so for a million years.But the Universe was discovered only yesterday.These million years were spent in innocent ignorance.In the last 10th.of a percent of the lifetime of our species,in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves,we reluctantly noticed that we were not the centre and purpose of the Universe,but rather lived in on a tiny and fragile world,lost in immensity and eternity,drifting in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion trillion galaxies and stars.Something in us recognizes the Universe as our home.We are made of stellar dust,our origin and evolution tied to distant cosmic events of temporal antiquity.There are worlds out there that have charred to ashes by cosmic catastrophes.We are fortunate,we are alive.The welfare of our civilization,our species,the green forests and the graceful dolphins lie in Our hands.If we do not speak for our planet,who will?Yet our energies find themselves channelised towards destruction.Hypnotized by mutual mistrust that is unique to our species,our nations and ideologies,with our religions and senseless fanatical chauvinism prepare for self-annihilation.And because we are doing is so horrifying,we tend not to think of it much through escapist excuses.But what we do not consider,we are unlikely to put right.

If we are not committed to our own survival and that of our cohabitants,who will be?

ONEIROLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

I have always been fascinated by Dreams.Recently, doing a little personal research into the subject,I came across a few theories which every school of Oneirology agrees upon.

Activation Synthesis Theory:

In 1976 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed a new theory that changed dream research, challenging the previously held Freudian view of dreams as subconscious wishes to be interpreted. Activation synthesis theory asserts that the sensory experiences are fabricated by the cortex as a means of interpreting chaotic signals from the pons. They propose that in REM sleep, the ascending cholinergic PGO (ponto-geniculo- occipital) waves stimulate higher midbrain and forebrain cortical structures, producing rapid eye movements. The activated fore brain then synthesizes the dream out of this internally generated information. They assume that the same structures that induce REM sleep also generate sensory information.

Hobson's 1976 research suggested that the signals interpreted as dreams originated in the brain stem during REM sleep. However, research by Mark Solms suggests that dreams are generated in the forebrain, and that REM sleep and dreaming are not directly related. While working in the neurosurgery department at hospitals in Johannesburg and London , Solms had access to patients with various brain injuries. He began to question patients about their dreams and confirmed that patients with damage to the parietal lobe stopped dreaming; this finding was in line with Hobson's 1977 theory. However, Solms did not encounter cases of loss of dreaming with patients having brain stem damage. This observation forced him to question Hobson's prevailing theory which marked the brain stem as the source of the signals interpreted as dreams. Solms viewed the idea of dreaming as a function of many complex brain structures as validating Freudian dream theory, an idea that drew criticism from Hobson.

 In 1978, Solms, along with partners William Kauffman and Edward Nadar, undertook a series of traumatic-injury impact studies using several different species of primates, particularly howler monkeys, in order to disprove Hobson's postulation that the brain stem played a significant role in dream pathology. Unfortunately, Solms' experiments proved inconclusive, as the high mortality rate associated with using an hydraulic impact pin to artificially induce brain damage in test subjects meant that his final candidate pool was too small to satisfy the requirements of the scientific method.

Continual Activation Theory:

Combining Hobson's activation synthesis hypothesis with Solms's findings, the continual-activatio n theory of dreaming presented by Jie Zhang proposes that dreaming is a result of brain activation and synthesis; at the same time, dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. Zhang hypothesizes that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from the temporary memory to the long-term memory, though there is not much evidence backing up this so-called "consolidation. " NREM sleep processes the conscious-related memory (declarative memory), and REM sleep processes the unconscious related memory (procedural memory).

Zhang assumes that during REM sleep, the unconscious part of a brain is busy processing the procedural memory; meanwhile, the level of activation in the conscious part of the brain will descend to a very low level as the inputs from the sensory are basically disconnected. This will trigger the "continual-activati on" mechanism to generate a data stream from the memory stores to flow through the conscious part of the brain. Zhang suggests that this pulse-like brain activation is the inducer of each dream. He proposes that, with the involvement of the brain associative thinking system, dreaming is, thereafter, self-maintained with the dreamer's own thinking until the next pulse of memory insertion. This explains why dreams have both characteristics of continuity (within a dream) and sudden changes (between two dreams).

Apparent Precognition:

According to surveys, it is common for people to feel that their dreams are predicting subsequent life events. Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences. The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events.In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future. Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.

Dream Interpretation:

Dreams were historically used for healing (as in the asclepieions found in the ancient Greek temples of Asclepius) as well as for guidance or divine inspiration. Some Native American tribes used vision quests as a rite of passage, fasting and praying until an anticipated guiding dream was received, to be shared with the rest of the tribe upon their return.

 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identified dreams as an interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. They also assert together that the unconscious is the dominant force of the dream, and in dreams it conveys its own mental activity to the perceptive faculty. While Freud felt that there was an active censorship against the unconscious even during sleep, Jung argued that the dream's bizarre quality is an efficient language, comparable to poetry and uniquely capable of revealing the underlying meaning.

Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams as part of the holistic nature of Gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as projections of parts of the self that have been ignored, rejected, or suppressed. Jung argued that one could consider every person in the dream to represent an aspect of the dreamer, which he called the subjective approach to dreams. Perls expanded this point of view to say that even inanimate objects in the dream may represent aspects of the dreamer. The dreamer may therefore be asked to imagine being an object in the dream and to describe it, in order to bring into awareness the characteristics of the object that correspond with the dreamer's personality.

Newer Insights:

In a paper published in October,2009, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

"It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams," Dr. Hobson said in an interview. "It's like jogging; the body doesn't remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It's the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness."

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

"Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those," said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center , in Minneapolis . "What I like about this new paper is that he doesn't make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing."

The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists. Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University , called Dr. Hobson's reasoning impressive but said it was not the only physiological interpretation of dreams.

"I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses," said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book "I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self" (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are "corrected" by the senses.

These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.

In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be "seeing" something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine. Full-on dreams, in the usual sense of the word, come much later. Their content, in this view, is a kind of crude test run for what the coming day may hold.None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning. Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.

Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.

In dozens of studies, researchers have brought people into the laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly.They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow ("I will be aware when I dream; I will observe") and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don't work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).

Lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, sleep researchers say — a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness. "This is just one kind of mixed state, but there are whole variety of them," Dr. Mahowald said. Sleepwalking and night terrors, he said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness.

In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper."You are seeing this split brain in action," he said. "This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time."

Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness.

"Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis," Jung said.

For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well.Whatever the Truth may be,I think we are all playwrites in our subconscious. .

Reference:

Nature Reviews Neuroscience

SURVIVAL OF THE WEAKEST?

Evolutionary biologists have long recognised the role serendipity plays in which species thrive and which wither on the Darwinian vine. Without the asteroid impact 65 million years ago, for instance, mammals would not have spread so soon into almost every ecological niche on Earth (dinosaurs were in the way). Yet when the subject strikes as close to home as why our ancestors survived and Neanderthals did not, scientists have resisted giving chance a starring role, preferring to credit the superiority of ancient Homo sapiens.

 

 Both are descendants of Homo erectus: some spread across Eurasia beginning 1.8 million years ago and evolved into Neanderthal by 300,000 years ago, and others evolved in Africa, becoming anatomically modern by 200,000 years ago and reaching Europe some 45,000 years ago.

These arrivistes are often portrayed as technologically and culturally more advanced, with their bone and ivory (not just stone) tools and weapons, their jewellery making and cave painting—the last two evidence of symbolic thought. Finlayson has his doubts. Neanderthals may have painted, too (but on perishable surfaces); they were no slouches as toolmakers; and studies of their DNA show they had the same genes for speech that we do. "They survived for nearly 300,000 years," Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum,says. "That modern humans got to Australia before they penetrated Europe suggests that Neanderthals held them off for millennia. That suggests they weren't that backward." Finlayson is a noted evolutionary ecologist.

Instead, moderns were very,very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest". About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers.That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more.

The open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type subsequently expanded so greatly in Europe.And that was "pure chance."

Thanks to recent discoveries that they were canny hunters, clever toolmakers, and probably endowed with the gift of language,Neanderthals have overcome some of the nastier calumnies hurled at them, especially that they were the "dumb brutes of the North", as evolutionary ecologist Finlayson describes their popular image.

But they have never managed to shake the charge that their extinction 30,000 years ago, when our subspecies of Homo sapiens replaced them in their European home, was their own dumb fault. Modern humans mounted a genocidal assault on them, goes one explanation, triumphing through superior skills. Moderns drove them into extinction through greater evolutionary fitness, says another, especially the moderns' greater intelligence or social advances like the sexual division of labour.

Winners get to write the textbooks. So it is no surprise that we, the children of the humans who replaced Neanderthals, "portray ourselves in the role of victors and reduce the rest (of the human lineage) to the lower echelons of vanquished," Finlayson writes. "To accept our existence as the product of chance requires a large dose of humility." But in a provocative new book, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived, he argues that chance is precisely what got us here. "A slight change of fortunes and the descendants of the Neanderthals would today be debating the demise of those other people that lived long ago," he argues.

New evidence has indicated that wet spells may have helped Stone Age humans cross the Sahara desert on their way out of Africa about 93,000 years ago.

According to a report in New Scientist, evidence indicates that water-dependent trees and shrubs grew in the Sahara desert between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago.

The Sahara would have been a formidable barrier during the Stone Age, making it hard to understand how humans made it to Europe from eastern Africa, where the earliest remains of our hominin ancestors are found.

Isla Castaneda of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and colleagues studied land plant hydrocarbons in Saharan dust that has settled on the sea floor off west Africa over the past 192,000 years.From the ratio of carbon isotopes in the hydrocarbons, they can work out which types of plants were present at different times.

While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago.So, the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time.That may have been enough to allow sub-Saharan Stone Age Homo sapiens to migrate north: the first fossils of modern humans outside Africa date from 93,000 years ago in Israel.

And both genetic analysis and archaeology show that humans didn't spread extensively beyond Africa until 50,000 years ago, suggesting a second migration at the time of the second wet spell.

Castaneda's team is not the first to suggest that wet spells may have come in handy.Last year, Anne Osborne of the University of Bristol, UK, suggested that the first migrants may have used a now-buried network of river channels in the Libyan Sahara, which dates roughly 120,000 years.

Whatever it is, "we" seem to be a lucky lot.And we seem to be getting away with it!

THE CRISIS WE ARE FACING

Like all our organs,the brain evolved over millions of years,increasing in complexity and information content.The brain has evolved from inside out.Deep inside is the oldest part,the brainstem,which conducts the basic functions of biological sustainance,including the 2 intrinsic rhythms of life-heartbeat and respiration.

The higher functions of the brain seem to have evolved in 3 successive phases:

1.Capping the brainstem is the R-Complex,the seat of aggression,ritual,territoriality and social hierarchy,which evolved hundreds of millions of years ago in our reptilian ancestors.Deep inside the skull of every one of us lies something like the brain of a crocodile.

2.Surrounding the R-Complex is the limbic system,the mammalicn brain,which evolved tens of millions of years ago in our ancestors who were mammals but not yet primates.It is the major source of our moods and emotions,our concern and care for the young.

3.And finally,living in uneasy truce with the more primitive brains beneath,is the cerebral cortex,which evolved millions of years ago,in our primate ancestors.The cerebral cortex,where matter is transformed into consciousness,is the point of our embarkation for all our cosmic voyages.Comprising more than 70% of the brain mass,it is the realm of intuition and critical analysis.It is here that we have ideas and inspirations,read and write,do mathematics and compose music.The cortex regulates our conscious lives.Civilization,in a way,is a product of the cerebral cortex,the world of Thought.

 

The world of thought is divided,roughly,into 2 hemispheres.The right hemisphere is mainly responsible for pattern recognition,intuition,sensitivity,creative insights.The left hemisphere presides over man's rational,analytical and critical thinking.These are the dual strengths,opposite in essence,that characterize human consciousness and cognition.Together,they seem to provide the means both for generating ideas and testing their validity.Simply speaking,these 2 hemispheres are engaged in a continuous and lifelong dialogue,channeled through an immense bundle of nerves,the corpus callosum,the bridge between creativity and analysis-both being so necessary to understand our surrounding world,immediate and remote.

The language of the brain is not the DNA language of our genes.Rather,what we 'know' is encoded in cells called neurons,essentially microscopic electrochemical switching elements.Even during sleep,the brain is active,pulsing and flashing with the complex existential functions of man-dreaming,remembering,figuring things out.Our thoughts,visions and fantasies have a physical reality.A "Thought" is made of hundreds of electrochemical impulses.

The information content of the human brain expressed in bits probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons,roughly about a hundred trillion bits.On the other hand,the information content in our DNA double helix need 5 billion bits.

The brain does much more than recollect.It compares,synthesizes,analyses,generates abstractions.For our supreme survival,we must figure out much more than our genes can know.That is why the brain 'library' is approximately a 10,000 times larger than our genetic library.Our passion for learning,evident in the behaviour of a toddler,is The Tool for our survival.Emotions and ritualised behaviour patterns are built deeply into us.They are part of our humanity.Yet they are not 'characteristically human',as many other animals have Feelings too.

 

What distinguishes our species from all others in this planet is Thought.The cerebral cortex,figuratively speaking,represents Existential Liberation.We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviourial patterns of reptiles or non-human primates.Man is largely responsible for what permeates into his brain from the external world,and for what man,as a responsible adult winds up caring for and knowing about.No longer in the mercy of his reptilian brain,man can change himself.

 

(Having said that,I would like to mention here a favourite 'thought' of mine which I love to muse over and over again.There is a remote chance that someone who shall be reading this one day,might agree with me,however inconsequential it might seem to be,as far as existential practicality is concerned.)

Were our Earth to be started all over again with all its physical features and its ontological history remaining identical,I strongly doubt that anything closely resembling a human being would ever emerge.(I would love to be corrected or contradicted on this by dependable teleologic contemplations that learned reader might like to put forward.)

As our learned ancestors dabbling with philosophy and science have proceeded to unravel,layer by layer,the mysteries of the subatomic world and macrocosmic grandeur of the fascinatingly 'endless' of the universe that we see,one common yet prominent scheme seems to stand out-That there is a powerful random character to the process of evolution.A cosmic ray striking a different gene to produce a different mutation,can potentially have small immediate consequences but profound late implications.Happenstance have played a powerful role not only in history but evolutionary biology too.The farther back these hypothetic critical events occur in time,the more powerfully and diversely can they influence the present.One does not need to go far searching for proofs of contextual affirmation of this when a simple example seems to lie 'at hand'.

The human hand has 5 fingers including an opposable thumb which serves us quite well.But I think we would have been served equally well if the hand had 6 fingers including the thumb,or 4 fingers and 2 thumbs. There is nothing intrinsically best about the particular configuration of the fingers our hands have,which one might think to be naturally inevitable.

 

 We have 5 fingers because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had 5 phalanges in its fins.Had we descended from a fish with 4 or 6 phalangesin its fins,we would have had 4 or 6 fingers which we would have thought to be perfectly natural. One profound consequence of this evolutionary specificity is that we use Base Ten Arithmetic because we have 10 fingers in 2 hands(arithmetic started in ancient Greece by counting with fingers).Had the arrangement been otherwise,we would have ended up with 'Base Eight' or 'Base Twelve' arithmetic.

 

The same point,I believe,applies to more essential aspects of our existence-our hereditary material,our biophysiology,our form and stature,passions and dispairs,tenderness and aggression,or even our cognitive and analytical processes.It is sheer bewilderment which fills one's senses to think that all these intrinsic factors are,at least partially,a result of apparently minor accidents in our long evolutionary history.The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity,and the incompleteners of our knowledge humbles us.

Man has come a long way.Furry little mammals hid in caves from the giant dinosaurs,colonized treetops,scampered down to domesticate fire,invented language and writing,constructed space observatories and harnessed nuclear energy.And in the process he has destroyed ecosystems and abused the pain-stakingly gathered knowledge of the subatomic world to build weapons of mass genocide.Today the world faces a great threat in Terrorism which has its seeds in fanatic ideologies and which tries to find justification through tennets of organized religion.

 

Here I would like to breeze through an academic endeavour which,unfortunately,did not find much peer review due to extreme polarisation of world politics which prevailed as The Cold War. Almost 4 decades back,neuropsychologist James W Prescott performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 pre-industrial societies and found that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined in violence.Prescott believed that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived,during infancy and adolescence,of the pleasures of the body.Where physical affection is encouraged,theft,organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous;where infants are physically punished,there tends to be slavery,frequent killing,torturing and mutilation of enemies,a devotion to the inferiority of women,and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.

We do not understand human behaviour grossly better than what we did during the times of Prescott,to be sure of the mechanisms underlying these relationships,although we can conjecture.Yet I mentioned Prescott as I find these correlations significant today.All I want to point out that we inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centres of the stars,where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of beautiful planets,where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way.And how pallid by comparison are the pretensions of Superstition and Pseudoscience,distortion of ideologies which take life in our planet.When shall man see Sense and understand the importance to pursue Knowledge and understand Science,that characterises human endeavour.

 

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family,next,to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers,then to tribes,small settlements,city-states and nations.We have broadened the circle of those we love.We have now organized what are modestly described as superpowers,which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working,in some sense,together-surely a humanizing and character-building experience.

If we are to survive the crises that threaten our sheer existence today,we have to broaden our loyalties further,to include the whole human community,and the entire planet Earth.People who run the superpowers will find this idea unpleasant,fearing loss of power.And perhaps one will hear much about treason and disloyalty.Rich nations will have to share their wealth with poor ones.But the choice is stark and ironic.It is clearly existence or nothing.

 

Reference:

Prescott,James W. "Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence."-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,page-10,November,1975.

ANTHROPY - OUR QUANTUM EXISTENCE

When one puts aside for a moment or two,his routine daily assignments that secure his temporal and spatial locus in human society,the immediate passion that engulfs him is a thirst or an overwhelming desire to know more about his status and the relevance of it in the seemingly infinite universe,his own origin way back since times immemorial,and the origin the universe itself(this desire is an essential component of human consciousness,a primal human instinct,and I am just no exception).

While men of wisdom-scientists and philosophers do seem to tie themselves in knots of abstraction that seem quite self-evident to me,behind such seemingly pointless debates lie some profound enigmas.Pondering over these riddles,scientists have lately warmed up to an idea that was once considered unscientific.

The idea goes by the esoteric name of Weak Anthropic Cosmological Principle.Its essence in a nutshell declares that if the initial conditions and the natural constants of our universe were not exactly what they are,there would be nobody to observe it,much less to enquire into its origin(Anthropy loosely refers to the aspect of creation of human beings).The corollary is radically awe-inspiring,suggesting that the conditions were such at the moment of creation of our universe,the Big Bang,that it presaged the eventual emergence of intelligent life in it.

The human mind's cognition and the ability to understand the laws of nature has presented many eminent scientists with a Mystery.Einstein expressed it most cogently when he famously remarked,"The most incomprehensible fact about Nature is that it is comprehensible.."when he was toying with the then-nascent idea of Quantum Entanglement.Equally bemused was Roger Penrose by the fact that the universe has developed 'in obedience to laws that human consciousness seems designed to grasp'.Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner also referred to the 'double miracle' of the existence of laws of nature and the human mind's capacity to divine them.

 

The anthropic principle provides a means for reconciling the two miracles.And that principle essentially states that the universe at the first moment of Creation,in some sense,must have known that we were coming.Here I would be most happy to be corrected by enlightened minds but this is the idea which I,as an absolute 'non-physicist',have formed for my own comprehension of the anthropic principle when my extra-curricular fondness for the subject of quantum physics compelled me to read books and through bits and pieces of information theorised by these scientists I mention here today.The perusal and subsequent conceptualisation becomes all the more ecstatic when one finds in this unique cosmogenic principle of Anthropy,clear and precise reflections of our own ancient texts on spiritualism,namely the Rig-Veda,the Upanishads and the Atharva-Veda.

At its inception,the entire universe was smaller than atom,the primal state of singularity,and thus subject to the laws of quantum physics.This means that the universe could have begun in near-infinite possible ways.The anthropic principle can be(and has been)factored in and indoctrinated HERE,thus requiring to state the evolution of conscious,intelligent beings was a necessary pre-condition for the beginning of the universe.The idea is blissfully awe-inspiring to me.
John Wheeler emphasizes in his mystically famous book At Home With The Univrese,"It is incontrovertible that the observer is a pariticipator in genesis.".The observer is Consciousness,and we are conscious agents,vehicles for manifestation of a potentiality that was there.

The idea is more metaphysical in essence than physical,and naturally it provokes sensible scepticism worldwide.The resultant debate is amongst the positive things the very concept of anthropy has led to-it has continued to stimulate human reasoning and all arguments,for or against,can only lead us closer to "The Truth".

A skeptic shall argue:Isn't it absurd to think that the enormous visible universe with its hundred billion galaxies,each with a hundred billion stars with their theoretically near-infinite number of planetary systems would be needed to produce life on just one planet?An anthropic protagonist would give an answer which has to do with the ever-expanding size of the universe,and the duration of time it takes to make the heavy elements necessary for life as we know it.The primeval universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and helium.The heavier elements have taken billions of years to be produced through thermonuclear reactions.For the universe to exist this long without 'falling unto itself',it had to expand to the incredible size that we perceive today.And we can't help it if we happen to occupy just a very small part of it.

Though named anthropic,the principle of cosmogeny allows space for hypotheses about possible extra-terrestrial life forms.For us humans,consciousness is earth-bound as our planet seems to be the only one(till now)to be cohabited by life and consciousness that is human,hence the term 'Anthropic'.There is compelling reason to believe that life and consciousness may not be unique to earth alone.The anthropic principle requires the presence of cognitive consciousness to act up to full definition.And preposterously speaking,consciousness might not be anthropo-centric.Here again staunch skeptics of a possible hypothesis of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence but willing to support the anthropic principle do speculate about another mind-boggling concept-the  possibility of Multiple Universes.

 

 The ATHARVAVEDA and the KATHOPONISHAD,while discoursing upon the esoteric concepts of Satya and Maya,indirectly touch upon a seemingly impossible concept of 11 parallel universes and 26 dimensions.One can simply marvel at the sheer brilliance of the philosophical minds that thought about these concepts 4,500 years ago.The most accomplished of theoretical physicists find it difficult to 'visualise' a 4 dimensional model of the universe while pondering upon equations that accommodates the presence of 6 or 7 dimensions(what they are apart from length-breadth-height of Space and Time is beyond my comprehensive capability,yet their hypothetical existence must be serving some purpose somewhere in the scientific world).And to come to think of it,ancient philosophers felt the presence of a multiversal,polydimensional Absolute Truth through inspired meditation.Over the last 80 years,the concept of the Multiverse(the simultaneous coexistence of multiple universes) has become a hypothetical necessity in quantum physics when one studies and tries to rationalise probable cosmogenic principles.
The major problem with the multiverse concept is that there is no way to confirm its actuality.Yet the fact that similar cosmological insights were meditated upon by man 4,500 years ago,should be a sharp pointer to a possible scheme of things and beings.The concept is seductively alluring,but still remains in the speculative domain.
So one can be best advised to deal with the universe we can genuinely observe and press forward the most provocative of enquiries:WHAT IS THE NATURE AND EFFECT OF OUR OBSERVERSHIP?

John Wheeler strongly believes that "in defining any useful concept of reality,we have to take into account the indispensable place of the participating observer-evidenced in quantum mechanics."
 After going through the minds of great minds,the concept of anthropy impresses an audaciously simplified(not necessarily simple)statement in my mind-Consciousness itself seems to be Fundamental if not Primary.

I would be the first person to dismiss consciousness as a mere by-product of our brain's electrochemical activity.The concept of consciousness as an epiphenomenon(or a phenomenon resulting from another phenomenon)was compatible with mechanistic classical physics.But the advent of Quantum Physics has altered this picture(I believe-Forever).In quantum physical experiments,an observer's consciousness Is Capable of bringing about a particular outcome from the coexisting possibilities inherent in any quantum system.The observer and the observed are fundamentally connected.Their relationship is interactive and participatory.The most comprehensive source of this statement comes from the EPR(Einstein,Podolsky,Rosen),the Entanglement or the Nonlocality experiment in 1935.(Ironically its purpose was to disprove quantum mechanics.But the very "impossibility" of an influence being faster than the speed of light that Einstein believed would be quantum physic's undoing turned out to be one of its signature proofs.)The entanglement theory basically proposes a simultaneous coexistence of all possibilities at the same time-Quantum Coherence.It can be represented mathematically using the Schrödinger Equation.

What all this has to do with human consciousness resides in the thesis advanced in various ways by Roger Penrose-"the human brain enfolds within its finest levels a quantum coherent state."  Some line of large-scale quantum coherence seems to act broadly across considerable regions of the brain.The concept seemed to be utterly reckless to me.But a simple thought changed my mind.An indication of the existence of such quantum states becomes apparent when one takes into account discrete changes(quantum leaps)in the state of our consciousness.Think of Sleep.Nobody remembers the exact moment one falls asleep.
Is it this quantum coherence of our brain that is responsible for our remarkable ability to interact with the universe and achieve the state we describe by the word "understanding"?
If this proves to be the case,then the most critical and uniquely human of our attributes is also,in more than a figurative way,entangled with the source of existence.

***"Cogito,ergo sum."(I think,therefore I am.) - Descartes.

***"Tat Twam Asi."(This is you) - the Upanishads.