Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

Deadly E. Coli in Europe

The BoingBoing blog has a good article by Maggie Koerth-Baker that summarizes the current state of knowledge about the deadly E. coli outbreak in Europe:

Europe is currently in the grip of a deadly outbreak of Escherichia coli O104:H4—a rare strain of a common bacterium. Prior to last month, E. coli O104:H4 had only been identified as a cause of illness in one, single person. As of yesterday, the bacteria had sickened thousands and killed 27.

...

Over the weekend, authorities thought they'd pinpointed the outbreak to a bad batch of organic salad sprouts. But, when preliminary tests of the sprouts turned up no evidence of contamination, they backed off and started pointing the finger at imported cucumbers and tomatoes from Spain. Today, the official opinion flip-flopped again. Direct tests of the sprouts are still turning up negative. But epidemiological studies show that people who ate the sprouts were 9 times more likely to become infected than those who had not.

She explains how hard it is to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. It's a nice education into this fight against food-borne illness.

Taking Control, Full Control, of Your Life

I found this bit from a post on Dan Ariely's blog very interesting. I've read both his books "Predictably Irrational" and "The Upside of Irrationality". Both are delightful and insightful. I also find his life inspiring: while preparing "fire signs" (a common feature in ceremonies of youth movements in Israel) he suffered third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body from an accidental magnesium flare explosion. He learned many lessons from how he handled himself through this time.

Here is the bit of his post that I found most interesting:

As the American population ages, the debate about the ethics of physician-assisted suicide for terminal patients becomes more important.

...

Outside of philosophical arguments, examination of an interesting finding regarding physician-assisted suicide – know as “The Oregon Paradox” – can add an interesting dimension to the debate. The paradox is the finding that when terminal patients in Oregon receive lethal medication (under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act), they often feel a sense of greater wellbeing and a desire to live longer. In 2010, of 96 patients requested lethal medication, only 61 actually took it. Even more interesting are the many anecdotal accounts of terminal patients, upon receiving lethal medication, that feel a surge of wellbeing and a desire to persevere through their illness.

Why is this this the case? Looking at this question from an expected-utility perspective suggests that given the option to terminate their own life, terminal patients will decide how long they want to live by comparing the value they expect to gain from the rest of their lives to the expected intensity of their suffering. At the point where future utility is expected to be negative – that is, when the patient’s condition becomes so intolerable that living any longer is not worth the cost – the patient would choose to end life if the option were available.

The critical point from this perspective is that patients choose the amount of time they are willing to continue living with their illness, which will depend how quickly they deteriorate. If the rate of deterioration is slower than expected, then patients should delay terminating their lives; if the rate of deterioration is faster than expected, patients should desire to end their lives quicker.

But now let us say that patients have been prescribed lethal medication and have the option of ending their lives at any point of their choosing. As before, patients don’t want to choose a time too soon or too distant, but with the power to control the end of their lives they no longer have a reason to err on the side of haste! The patients can now wake up every day with the comfort of knowing that they do not have to suffer through pain or stress they might find intolerable.

Being given the option to determine the time of our own death can transform patients from powerless victims of their illness to willing survivors of it. Together, the importance of feeling in control and the ability to reduce (but not eliminate) uncertainty about rate of deterioration adds an interesting new dimension to the underlying ethical debate and seems to provide credence to the benefits of legalized physician-assisted suicide.

It is clear is that we need a greater understanding of the decision-making of patients at the end of their lives, and that with this improved understanding we can construct policy to better protect their wellbeing (for an interesting recent movie on this topic see “How to Die in Oregon”).

I'm a bit of a fanatic. I think people should take responsibility for themselves and have the freedom to make their own choices. On the other hand, I realize that some people really aren't competent to run their own lives (mental deficiencies, moral deficiencies, etc.) So I'm in a bit of a bind. I live under a grand banner about "the nature of man' but realize that there needs to be lots of find print and "lawyerese" to handle the fact that we are not all cookie-cutter the same. In short, I don't really have a simple clear answer to all of life's questions that can be printed on a cereal boxtop. I end up with slogans and qualifications. And I leave it open for debate and clarification. That's the best I think anybody can do.

I do know that even though euthanasia is "illegal" my mother in the 1980s told the doctor's "no heroic measures" for her father which was essentially the code words for "let him die". And with my mother, when she couldn't stand her disabilities from a flubbed brain surgery asked me to "get her out of here!", I did the paperwork to move her to a hospice where she was allowed to die. In effect I signed her death papers.

As Dan Ariely's piece above shows, the issue of euthanasia is not black-and-white as the noisy interest groups would make you think. It is complex. Ultimately it is best left to the family with state intervention only if it is clear that somebody in the family is manipulating things for their own interest and things are not being done in the best interest of the person who is dying. That is a broad rule that requires eternal vigilance and interpretation, but that is the glory of English common law. It is law that is "living" and constantly being reinterpreted as we learn more and as things change. Nothing carved in stone like the religious bigots would have you believe. Instead, a law based on the best judgments of your peers and an honest judge.

Rule of Thumb: Never Go Into the Hospital

My mother had a brain tumour, but it was a case of H. influenzae that she picked up while at the hospital that pushed her over the edge and led indirectly to her death. At the same time everybody else in my family picked up that same infection of H. influenzae. It made my brother and I sick but we recovered. My father was hospitalized with it and I suspect, like my mother, this infection pushed him over the edge because he died a few weeks later.

Here's Maureen Dowd with her own story of hospital-acquired illness. From an op-ed in the NY Times:

When my brother went into the hospital with pneumonia, he quickly contracted four other infections in the intensive care unit.

Anguished, I asked a young doctor why this was happening. Wearing a white lab coat and blue tie, he did a show-and-tell. He leaned over Michael and let his tie brush my sedated brother’s hospital gown.

“It could be anything,” he said. “It could be my tie spreading germs.”

I was dumbfounded. “Then why do you wear a tie?” I asked. He shrugged and left for rounds.

Michael died in that I.C.U. A couple years later, I read reports about how neckties and lab coats worn by doctors and clinical workers were suspected as carriers of deadly germs. Infections kill 100,000 patients in hospitals and other clinics in the U.S. every year.

Most experts will tell you that diseases in hospitals are carried from room to room by nurses, doctors, and other staff. The simple remedy: wash your hands. But most don't. This reminds me of the earliest lesson in hospital-acquired disease: Ignaz Semmelweis showed that women giving birth were dying of puerperal fever because of germs carried by doctors. This was in the 1840s. That was over 170 years ago. But doctors and medical staff continue to ignore basic sanitary precautions and kill their patients!

Patients are the victim of this system:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that health care workers, even doctors and nurses, have a “poor” record of obeying hand-washing rules.

A report in the April issue of Health Affairs indicated that one out of every three people suffer a mistake during a hospital stay.

I saw infractions of the rules in the I.C.U. where Michael died, but I never called out anyone. I was too busy trying to ingratiate myself with the doctors, nurses and orderlies, irrationally hoping that they’d treat my brother better if they liked us.

So the basic lesson to be learned: never go into a hospital unless you are already on death's door. It shouldn't be this way, but hospitals and medical staff have shown themselves to be impervious to simple education about basic sanitary measures for over 170 years. They won't change in what is left of my life. Instead, they will continue killing patients while going about the great drama of "saving lives". It is just like the insanity of pre-modern medicine where doctors made a great show of bleeding patients, killing many, in the name of "curing" them. Tragic.

Viewing People Inside Out

Here is a snippet from an interesting film done by a person with autism entitled Normal People Scare Me:



I remember first becoming fascinated with this disorder back in the early 1970s when I wrote a review of a book on autism. Like most books back then, that author took seriously that this was a psychological "disorder" caused by refrigerator moms. This was especially cruel because the poor mothers of autistic kids are overwhelmed by the problems that this condition creates, the additional burdens of mothering, and to then turn and blame the mother! Sadly this was from the idiotic "Freudian" interpretation of disorders as all arising from problems in relationships and not from genetics or disease.

From Wikipedia:

Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is unclear whether ASD is explained more by rare mutations, or by rare combinations of common genetic variants.

The good news is that intense intervention early in development gives these kids a much better life. They will never be "normal" but many of them can have reasonable lives. In the past, most were "institutionalized" which is just another name for warehousing until they die. And if you put a person in an institution with little loving interaction, many die fairly quickly. So the "solution" in the past was a kind of euthanasia. I have no problem with people choosing this option. It should be the decision of the family. But the good news is that for families with the strength to meet the challenges of raising an autisitic kid, there are much more positive outcomes today than there were 30 or 50 years ago.

One of my favourite science writers, Stephen Jay Gould, had a son with autism who was a calendar calculator like the twins Flo & Kate. I also enjoy books by autistics. Some that quickly come to mind are Temple Grandin's books Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation and Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day (a savant with synesthesia).

Watch this talk given by Temple Grandin at a TED conference:

Bugs are Us

Here are some fascinating snippets from an article by Carl Zimmer in his Discover magazine blog. I've bolded the key bits:

There are probably 100 trillion microbes inside each of us, such that our bodies are ten microbes for every one human cell. Those tenants probably belong to several thousand species, with a collection of genes that’s perhaps a 100 times bigger than the human genome. These microbes live in our guts, lungs, mouths, noses, skin, and many other nooks and crannies. Far from making us sick, they help us in many ways, making food for us, defending us from invaders, and nurturing our immune systems.

These bacteria are also hosts to viruses. In World War I, the Canadian doctor Felix d’Herelle discovered the first virus infecting bacteria while studying the stool of French soldiers sick with dysentery. Once he isolated the bacteria-attacking virus, he could use it to destroy cultures of the dysentery-causing bacteria. He dubbed them bacteriophages (eaters of bacteria). In the decades since his discovery, scientists have discovered a mind-boggling number of bacteriophages in the ground, the oceans, and even in deep caves. They are, in fact, the most abundant form of life on Earth. Now researchers are turning the tools for identifying bacteriophages back to our own body.

Last year, Jeffrey Gordon and his colleagues looked in the guts of four pairs of identical twins and their mothers and discovered over 4,000 different kinds of viruses among them. Each person had several hundred kinds apiece. Most of these viruses were not predators, like the viruses that attack dysentery-causing bacteria, or the ones the give us a cold. Instead, the viruses merge with their host cell. They can be passed down from one generation to the next; only if they sense danger do these viruses break out of their host.

...

It’s astonishing for most people to learn there are between 500 and 1000 species of bacteria in their mouths. But now we must begin to get used to the fact that those bacteria are in a constant battle with hundreds–perhaps even thousands–of different viruses. One reason it’s such a big surprise is that these battles take place without any noticeable effect on ourselves. But it would be a mistake to think that they have no effect at all. The state of our mouth’s ecosystem plays a big role in our overall health.

Go read the whole thing to get all the dirty little details!

A Small Success for Mankind, One Giant Leap for a Better Tomorrow

Here's a NY Times story of a scientific success, just one more in a long line of successes by science that make life better for us:

Livestock Virus Eradicated, U.N. Says

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

In only the second elimination of a disease in history, rinderpest — a virus that used to kill cattle and wildlife by the millions — has been declared wiped off the face of the earth.

Rinderpest, which means “cattle plague” in German, does not affect humans, though it belongs to the same virus family as measles. But for millenniums in Asia, Europe and Africa it wiped out cattle, water buffalo, yaks and other animals needed for meat, milk, plowing and cart-pulling.

Its mortality rate is about 80 percent — higher even than smallpox, the only other disease ever eliminated.

The last case was seen in Kenya in 2001. On Thursday, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization announced that it was dropping its field surveillance efforts because it was convinced the disease was gone. The official ceremony in which the World Organization for Animal Health will declare the world rinderpest-free is scheduled for May.

Go read the rest of the article to get more background on this story.

I'm bothered by the fact that so many people are proud of their scientific ignorance. The world could only sustain about one-fifth the current population if science was removed. We would be back in the dark ages where the only light you had was the fire you could keep. No refrigeration to allow variety in choice in diet. No miracles of science to provide entertainment and transportation. But despite these stark facts, a solid majority of people claim they want to live their lives by some rules drawn up by a wandering nomad tribe nearly three thousand years ago (updated by a near-illiterate from the backwaters of the Roman Empire or a failed merchant from the wild tribes of the Arabian desert). Bizarre. Just look at the Bible to see how much disease and death is in that book. That's what you get is you turn your back on science.

How Bad is Stress on Your Health?

Here's a bit from an excellent article by Jonah Lehrer in Wired Magazine about stress and its effects. A key result is that executives talking about their "stressful work" are not really stressed out. It is the employees at the bottom of the pecking order who suffer from the bad kind of stress that wrecks your health:

A few years ago, Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, led a study of Academy Award-winning actors. His hypothesis was that having an Oscar gave people more control over their stressful careers. Instead of being forced to accept bad roles or work on mediocre movies just for the money, these stars could pick and choose their parts. This creative control, in turn, would lead to improved health outcomes. Redelmeier compared the award winners to two groups: (1) actors who had appeared in the same film as a nominated actor and didn’t get a nomination and (2) actors who had been nominated for an Academy Award but never won. The results were clear: People with Oscars lived, on average, four years longer than their less-successful peers, which represented a 28 percent reduction in death rate. As Redelmeier notes, this longevity boost is roughly equal to the effect that would come from “curing all cancers in all people for all time.”

Here's another take on this same effect:

While doctors speculated for years that increasing rates of cardiovascular disease in women might be linked to the increasing number of females employed outside the home, that correlation turned out to be nonexistent. Working women didn’t have more heart attacks. There were, however, two glaring statistical exceptions to the rule: Women developed significantly more heart disease if they performed menial clerical work or when they had an unsupportive boss. The work, in other words, wasn’t the problem. It was the subordination.

Here's a bit more from the article that details the downside effects of stress:

Chronic stress, it turns out, is an extremely dangerous condition. And not just for baboons: People are as vulnerable to its effects as those low-ranking male apes. While stress doesn’t cause any single disease — in fact, the causal link between stress and ulcers has been largely disproved — it makes most diseases significantly worse. The list of ailments connected to stress is staggeringly diverse and includes everything from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer’s disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more.

...

The emergence of stress as a major risk factor is largely a testament to scientific progress: The deadliest diseases of the 21st century are those in which damage accumulates steadily over time. (Sapolsky refers to this as the “luxury of slowly falling apart.”) Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of damage that’s exacerbated by emotional stress. While modern medicine has made astonishing progress in treating the fleshy machine of the body, it is only beginning to grapple with those misfortunes of the mind that undo our treatments.

The power of this new view of stress — that our physical health is strongly linked to our emotional state — is that it connects a wide range of scientific observations, from the sociological to the molecular. On one hand, stress can be described as a cultural condition, a byproduct of a society that leaves some people in a permanent state of unease. But that feeling can also be measured in the blood and urine, quantified in terms of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine and adrenal hormones. And now we can see, with scary precision, the devastating cascade unleashed by these chemicals. The end result is that stress is finally being recognized as a critical risk factor, predicting an ever larger percentage of health outcomes.

I enjoyed this sly dig at the dysfunctional US government while considering the chemicals -- glucocoricoids -- that underlie stress:

But glucocorticoids have a nasty side effect: When they linger in the bloodstream, as they might due to chronic stress related to low rank, damage accumulates. It’s the physiological version of a government devoting too many resources to its defense department, Sapolsky says. The body is so worried about war that it doesn’t fix the roads or invest in schools.

Go read the whole article to find out how Robert Sapolsky is progressing in developing a "vaccine" to treat stress.

Food Fads and Fanatics

Here is a bit from a long post by Denise Minger on her blog Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet. She looks at The China Study by T. Colin Campbell which makes claims such as:

The authors introduce and explain the conclusions of scientific studies, which have correlated animal-based diets with disease. The authors conclude that diets high in animal protein (including casein in cow's milk) are strongly linked to diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes. (from Wikipedia)

Minger digs around with the underlying data to look at statistical correlations. They don't pan out. The claims of The China Study are bogus because the data don't support the claims.

Here's one example.

Campbell Claim #6

Western-type diseases, in the aggregate, are highly significantly correlated with increasing concentrations of plasma cholesterol, which are associated in turn with increasing intakes of animal-based foods.

From his book, we know Campbell defines Western-type diseases as including heart disease, diabetes, colorectal cancers, breast cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. And indeed, the variable “total cholesterol” correlates positively with many of these diseases:

Myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease: +4
Diabetes: +8
Colon cancer: +44**
Rectal cancer: +30*
Colorectal cancer: +33**
Breast cancer: +19
Stomach cancer: +17
Leukemia: +26*
Liver cancer: +37*

Perhaps surprisingly, total cholesterol has only weak associations with heart disease and diabetes—weaker, in fact, than the correlation between these conditions and plant protein intake (+25 and +12, respectively). But we’ll put that last point aside for the time being. For now, let’s focus on the diseases with statistical significance, which include all forms of colorectal cancer, leukemia, and liver cancer. (Despite classifying stomach cancer as a “Western disease,” by the way, China actually has far higher rates of this disease than any Western nation. In fact, half the people who die each year from stomach cancer live in China.)

I remember reading the Greeks in my youth. Funny how old men get very concerned about their diet. They become convinced that "if only" they ate this and not that, then their digestion would be better, their health would improve, they would get back the vigor of youth. It is an eternal illusion. Pythagoras was wierd about beans. The Classical calls for moderation made sense. But proscribing certain food struck me as odd.

I've since noticed that most people -- when they hit their 50s and 60s -- develop strange fetishes about food. They worry that something is "bad" for them and something else is presumed to have some magical "good quality" and more should be consumed. Funny. Our ancestors on the savannas of Africa didn't have this tendency to culinary quackery. They ate what was available and were grateful for it. Moderation was enforced by scarcity. Their worry wasn't the degenerative diseases of old age but the ever present threat of famine.

Here's an example of a food fanatic, Ray Kurzweil (the following is from a post by Ursula Goodenough on the NPR blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture):

Kurzweil, in fact, hopes cryonic preservation won’t be necessary. His preferred route being to avoid dying in the first place. To this end, according to Wikipedia, he consumes 150 supplements (down from 250), 10 glasses of alkaline water (to neutralize acidic metabolic wastes) and 10 cups of green tea every day, drinks several glasses of red wine a week to "reprogram" his biochemistry, and is transfused with reprogramming chemical cocktails at a clinic each weekend.

Another approach is extreme calorie restriction. This is a nutty idea based on some fuzzy research on nematodes that suggests near starvation can make you live longer. Here's a bit from Wikipedia.

Putting a Name to an Old Mental Disease

Here's a bit from a NY Times article by Benedict Cary about the evolution of names for and old mental disease: neurasthenia. Oh, OK, I'll give it its more modern name: mental breakdown. Or if I'm really trendy: burnout syndrome. Isn't it wonderful how we label and re-label things?

Decades ago modern medicine all but stamped out the nervous breakdown, hitting it with a combination of new diagnoses, new psychiatric drugs and a strong dose of professional scorn. The phrase was overused and near meaningless, a self-serving term from an era unwilling to talk about mental distress openly.

But like a stubborn virus, the phrase has mutated.

In recent years, psychiatrists in Europe have been diagnosing what they call “burnout syndrome,” the signs of which include “vital exhaustion.” A paper published last year defined three types: “frenetic,” “underchallenged,” and “worn out” (“exasperated” and “bitter” did not make the cut).

This is the latest umbrella term for the kind of emotional collapses that have plagued humanity for ages, stemming at times from severe mental difficulties and more often from mild ones. There have been plenty of others. In the early decades of the 20th century, many people simply referred to a crackup, including “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 collection of essays describing his own. And before that there was neurasthenia, a widely diagnosed and undefined nerve affliction causing just about any symptom people cared to add.

Yet medical historians say that, for versatility and descriptive power, it may be hard to improve upon the “nervous breakdown.” Coined around 1900, the phrase peaked in usage during the middle of the 20th century and echoes still. One recent study found that 26 percent of respondents to a national survey in 1996 reported that they had experienced an “impending nervous breakdown,” compared with 19 percent from the same survey in 1957.

This bit catches the essence of finding just the right name for a disease:

Through the ages, every generation has attributed its own catchall diagnosis to larger cultural changes. Industrialization. Modernization. The digital age. The 19th-century philosopher William James reportedly called neurasthenia, from which he claimed to suffer himself, “Americanitis,” in part the result of the accelerating pace of American life. So it was with breakdowns. The causes were largely external — and recovery a matter of better managing life’s demands.

As medicine gets "professionalized" we get more specific:

Psychiatrists proceeded to slice problems like depression and anxiety into dozens of categories, and public perceptions shifted, too. In 1976, 26 percent of people admitted seeking professional help, up from 14 percent in 1947, according to Dr. Stearns’s analysis. And “nervous breakdown” began to fade from use.

Read the article. It is fun and interesting.

Parasites Running You Like a Robot

Here is Robert Sapolsky talking about Toxoplasma gondii:



At 16:20 he starts talking about the US military and its interest in this parasite's ability to take control of a human and do risky things (like make troops run out and get shot down in one vast orgy of defeat).

This video is taken from issue 307 of Edge.

In this same issue there is an interesting essay by Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard. He talks about the the human moral sense. Contrary to what religious teachers claim, religion doesn't give us our morality, the morality is built int:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

...

Consider the psychopath, Hollywood's favourite moral monster. Clinical studies reveal that they feel no remorse, shame, guilt or empathy, and lack the tools for self-control. Because they lacked these capacities, several experts have argued that they lack the wherewithal to understand what is right or wrong and, consequently, to do the wrong thing. New studies show, however, that this conclusion is at least partially wrong. Psychopaths know full well what is right and wrong but don't care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged. They are perfectly normal jurists but perfectly abnormal moral actors. For the psychopath, other humans are no different from rocks or artefacts. They are disposable.

...

... living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

Go look at the Edge issue to read this essay if for no other reason.