Reading Palms- For Health, Not the Future

            My parents are obsessed with yoga. This was made obvious last Thanksgiving.

In New Jersey at my aunt’s house, winding down a long leisurely dinner (lots of Indian food), my dad talks yoga to my cousin, a skeptical 17 year old boy.

            
    “Put your palms together- no, not like that, just line them up next to each other,” says my dad. My cousin follows, anticipating being walked through a yogic contortion of the hands. His face is scrunched up, preemptively defensive in case he should fail this test. “Try to make all the ridges line up. Like mine. See, how the indentations in my fingers and palms are almost a perfect mirror image? Now look at yours.”

                My cousin looks at his hands. The ridges are woefully misaligned.

                I try it too. My hands aren’t as misaligned as his, but the symmetry is still nowhere near perfect.

                “That’s a sign that your life is out of balance,” says my dad. “Yoga can fix that. My palms didn’t match either, until I started doing yoga.”

                The preemptive-defensive scrunch deepens. “Yoga doesn’t have anything to do with it,” mumbles my cousin. “Humans are supposed to be asymmetrical. Anything else is unnatural.”

                Great, I think. The poor boy’s going to develop another complex.

                “But think about it. There’s a reason humans are mostly symmetrical, right? Doesn’t that suggest that being completely symmetrical is better?”

                “It’s hereditary.” My cousin’s voice rises to a louder defensive mumble. “It’s not something we can control.”

                My mom tries another tactic. “It’s a sign of homeostasis,” she explains. Mentally I applaud her word choice: my cousin is an AP Bio nerd. “If your hands are mirror images, it’s a sign that there’s balance in your mind and body, and in your way of thinking. It’s always better to be a balanced person than an unbalanced one, right?”

                “I’m not unbalanced!” My cousin twists and bends his hands, trying and failing to make the indentations line up. I start clearing the table. If I get involved, it’s likely I’ll be sitting at this table listening to everybody’s arguments and counter-arguments all night. Though I don’t show this, I’m also a bit put out at the implication that I, with my also-asymmetrical hands, am unbalanced.

                Later, I decided to see if there was some basis in what my parents were saying, if it’s been scientifically proven that more symmetrical palms indicate a more balanced or healthier person.

                It’s true.

                I found many studies about facial symmetry, demonstrating that people find more symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical ones, and hypothesizing that facial symmetry is a signal for health. But I was more interested in the palms question.

                Humans are a bilaterally symmetrical species. If you were to cut a human body down the middle and place a mirror in between, the human would look pretty much normal (from the outside- we’re not symmetrical from the inside: just think of the digestive system!). So it stands to reason that symmetrical hands and feet would signal health as honestly as symmetrical facial structure.

                But my cousin wasn’t wrong. Some asymmetry is natural. There are three kinds of asymmetry we can have: directional asymmetry (in which one side of your body is more “deviant” from the symmetry than the other, for example, if your right hand, right foot, and right eye were all a little bigger), antisymmetry (for example, your right hand and right eye are bigger, but your left foot and left- I don’t know- hipbone are bigger), and fluctuating asymmetry.

“Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is defined as the random, stress-induced deviations from perfect symmetry that develop during the development of bilaterally symmetrical traits.”¹ Fluctuating asymmetry is an honest signal for your developmental stability- how well your body is able to translate your genes into the proteins that make up your body and its functions. “Good developmental stability suggests greater resistance to environmental stresses.”¹ The less FA you have, the more developmentally stable you are.

                Lots of the information in the review article was about reasons for FA beyond a person’s control. In general, the more FA you have, the more stressful or traumatic your development was. It might mean your mom had health problems or was exposed to toxins in her environment when she was pregnant with you. It might mean you grew up in stressful conditions. It might mean you’re going through puberty and the proliferation of sex hormones is temporarily sapping your body of energy to devote to developmental stability. It might mean you’re old and your body’s in decline. It might mean you have schizophrenia- it’s known that schizophrenics have higher FA, and the worse your symptoms are, the more pronounced your asymmetry. It could also mean you’re autistic.

                FA also signals personality traits. Apparently, men with lower FA (men who are more symmetrical) are more socially dominant, aggressive, and violent.¹

But where the review article got really interesting for me, was when it talked about how FA signals your emotional state.

“[A study] found facially asymmetrical men to be more depressed, more emotionally labile, and more impulsive than relatively symmetrical men. Asymmetrical women experienced more muscle soreness and were also more impulsive than more symmetrical women.”¹

                Hmmm. So here’s a lead. If you are asymmetrical, it could mean something is messed up in your emotions, which could come from a flawed way of thinking or approaching the world.

                FA occurs in the hands as well as the face, I’ve found. The word for the study of the ridges in one’s skin is dermatoglyphics.  Dermatoglyphics can be a good gauge for how severe a schizophrenic’s symptoms are. The palms are an easy place to look, because the lines are clearly visible and it’s easy to hold your hands, palms up, side by side.

                I know that yoga can help a great deal with psychological and physical disorders. It’s not a big leap to imagine that yoga’s effects can, in turn, reduce FA. Not entirely, of course- if your mom smoked while pregnant, there’s probably nothing you can do to convert your palms to total symmetry. But if your main causes for FA are that you don’t eat, sleep and exercise the way you should, and your worldview is making you stressed-out in some way, you can fix that. In that case, watching the gradual re-shifting of the lines in your palms toward symmetry would be a desired effect, a way of monitoring the restoration of balance in your body and mind.

                I don’t think it’s something to fixate on the way my cousin did for the rest of that vacation. I don’t think it’s something to get a complex about, if your palm lines are slightly misaligned. But if you try yoga or a similar healthy lifestyle choice, and after a few months or years see that your palms are more symmetrical than they were, it might give you a burst of affirmation that you’re doing something right.

Source:

Kowner, Rotem. “Psychological perspective on human developmental stability and fluctuating asymmetry: Sources, applications and implications.” British Journal of Psychology 2001, 92: 447-469. Print.

                

Pleasure spiked with pain: Ode to Red Hot Chili Peppers

The ones you eat, not the band. (If I were writing about the band, I'd gush for over 9,000 words, and that's not very interesting now is it?)

One World Café in Baltimore has amazing vegetarian chili. People from Sri Lanka or Texas find it mild. People who grew up in homes where spice amounted to salt on mashed potatoes have to do a little dance and drink a little water.

And then there were ninth-birthday sleepovers, when we’d mix up the spiciest concoction possible from whatever was in the fridge and dare a girl to eat it. Not to mention freshman year of college, when the boys would have hot sauce chugging contests (watering eyes, fist-bumps, cries of “Auuuugh!”). If you can’t take the heat, you’re a wimp. Maybe that idea phases out of girl-society ten years before it does for boys, or maybe it just manifests itself differently. Either way, dares and contests imply that the people partaking are not doing it for pleasure. They seek out pain. If they liked eating habaneros the way I eat French fries, it’d be like a sleeping contest.

Growing up, whenever my Southern Maryland Indian community would have “functions,” the options would be Indian food (traditional spicy curries), and kid food (pasta salad, pizza etc). My parents encouraged me and my sister to eat the adult food. The kids who shied away from spices were considered spoiled. For a 14 year old to eat just pizza was unacceptable.

Okay. So spicy food is a rite of passage of some sort. To adulthood, responsibility, or just some arbitrary standard of adolescent toughness.

I was one of the good kids. I’d eat the hot food. For many years I didn’t like it at all. I’d long for mashed potatoes, buttered bread, mac’n’cheese, vegetables that weren’t “destroyed” by “gross things.” My parents would try to get me to finish my dinner by telling me about Columbus, that for centuries Europe didn’t have spices, so I should count myself lucky because I had so many of these voyaged-after spices in just one spoonful of food.  

It didn’t work. I envied those dark-aged Europeans who could eat their food without pain. To me, food devoid of discomfort was the supreme self-indulgence.

I’m in grad school. Now I can have as much bland food as I want. Bland food is easier to find or make than intricately spiced curries. Yet do I gorge myself on mac’n’cheese, mashed potatoes, bread rolls, fries without ketchup?

Sure, but not all the time. Just in those rare moods that also impel me to watch Hey Arnold or rock out to N’Sync or bug my friends to play Freeze Tag, which a 23-year-old adult (ha) probably shouldn’t admit to. Mostly, I prefer spicy food. I have no desire to chug Tabasco in a contest, but I do dump a healthy dose of Sriracha into my stir-fries. One World’s chili is my ideal level of spice because it’s just enough to hurt a teensy bit.

What does this mean? Have I become so habituated to pain that I now find it pleasurable? That I now need a bit of pain to really enjoy myself?

The Answers

                (I found a paper and a review article that explain the chili conundrum to me. I’ve incorporated that information here. If this interests you, I strongly suggest reading the Rozin article on your own, because it covers a lot about our food preferences beyond the chili pepper.)

                Some people like spicy food the first time they eat it. Same with fizzy drinks, which elicit similar patterns on your nervous system as spicy foods do.¹ The first time you tried soda, you were probably surprised by the bubbles. Once you realized that the sensation wasn’t wholly unpleasant, you opened yourself to curiosity about it, and the novelty led to liking. “Attempts are currently underway to develop and market carbonated foods, such as fruits and vegetables, one rationale being that the carbonation makes the food more interesting for children.”¹ That’s crazy talk. Why not just make kids eat their vegetables? Why not threaten them with time-out or extra chores? But I digress.

Many people don’t like spicy food immediately, but acquire a taste for it which strengthens each time they eat it. In a study covered in the Carstens paper, self-reported “likers” and “non-likers” of spicy food were asked to eat meals designed to have specific concentrations of capsaicin (the chemical that makes chili peppers burn). Even when likers and non-likers gave the same food the same burn rating, likers gave it a higher pleasantness rating than non-likers. “There was a linear increase in the rated liking of spiced (but not unspiced) food across weekly sessions,”¹ states the paper, demonstrating that spicy food improves upon exposure.

                One possible reason is that spicy food is pleasurable precisely because it is painful. “Irritant chemicals activate trigeminal pain pathways, which in turn could conceivably lead to endorphin release.” ¹ The trigeminal nerve connects the tongue with the brain, among other things. If it senses pain, it can relay that information to the brain, which will compensate with endorphins: natural opiates that cause us to feel pleasure. The amount of burn felt by your mouth is proportional to the dose of released endorphins. People who eat chili on a regular basis require a higher dose of capsaicin in order to detect it, so they might be chronically desensitized.¹ This means people like me have it good, because we’re not as sensitive to the pain of capsaicin burn, yet experience all the pleasure of the endorphins.

If you discover that eating a particular food brings positive effects and no negative ones, your body will develop a preference for it.² This makes biological sense because we’re wired to react ambivalently to new foods: with a mixture of interest (potential nutrition source!) and fear (potential poison!). It’s easier to form an aversion than a preference for a new food, but if you get endorphins from eating spicy food, and the initial aversiveness of the taste doesn’t make you break out in hives or anything, you will become more likely to enjoy chili.

You will also like spicy food better if the way you were introduced to it brought otherwise pleasant sensations. If you were introduced to the chili pepper in a badly cooked recipe, you just won’t be that into it. I was introduced to it in my mother’s cooking, which is good whether you enjoy spices or not. Also, apparently the shift between dislike to liking of spices happens between the ages of 5 and 8 in chili-eating cultures like mine,² so is really no forgiveness for anyone above elementary school eating the kids’ pizza.

                Spicy food brings a thrill that comes from your body sensing danger, but your mind knowing it’s safe. It’s the same reason we love rollercoasters.² Also, children develop some food preferences due to social factors, including direct pressure (rewards/punishments), and just observing that respected heroes, elders and peers like that food. ² Maybe these factors all combine to explain freshmen boys chugging hot sauce, though I maintain that they’re just silly.

                Of course, there are purely biological factors that motivate spice-eating. A liking for spices is adaptive because spices are antimicrobial, provide nutrition and vitamins, and make you sweat and salivate (which is good in hot and dry climates).¹

               

                So if you’re a Baltimorean who tends to shy away from spicy food, I’d suggest you go to One World and try the chili. Pick it up- it’s not too strong for you. You might love the rollercoaster.  

Sources:

1. Carstens, E., et al. “It hurts so good: oral irritation by spices and carbonated drinks and the underlying neural mechanisms.” Food Quality and Preference, 13, 2002: 431-443. Electronic.

2. Rozin, P., and T. A. Vollmecke. “Food Likes and Dislikes.” Annual Review of Nutrition, 6, 1986: 433-456. Electronic.  

Pleasure, Pain, Brave New World, and the Brain

Pleasure, Pain, Brave New World, and the Brain

Pleasure. Pain. They sound like opposites, yet they’re not. Sometimes the line is blurred- sometimes it’s nonexistent. And everybody experiences these states differently.  I hate running, but lots of my friends experience runner’s high. I love the burn of spicy food, but many people I know hate it. There are people who cut themselves and enjoy the sensations. Skinny dipping in the winter. Marilyn Manson’s music. Examples are everywhere.

I’d figured that everyone had a different line separating their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But then I came across a review article from the April 2008 issue of Nature, “A Common Neurobiology for Pain and Pleasure,” and learned that the reality is more complex, and more fascinating.

Your brain often receives signals of both pleasure (a subjective emotional reward) and pain (punishment) at the same time, and must decide which to concentrate on and which to ignore. Pleasure becomes keener when it becomes more useful in restoring your body’s balance. Its “reward value” increases. The hungrier we are, the better food tastes. And if you’re in real danger, pain’s unpleasantness, or “punishment value,” increases too. Your brain must weigh the various inputs it receives to decide what to perceive.

“The subjective utility- or ‘meaning’- or pain or pleasure for the individual is determined by sensory, homeostatic, cultural, and other factors that, when combined, bias the… experience of pleasure,”¹ states the article. Essentially, the way we experience a particular sensation depends on its context. Of course our sensory experience is important- something feels good to our body, or it doesn’t.  If chocolate is sweet, you will feel pleasure eating it.

“Homeostatic” refers to the body’s internal drive for balance. If you’re really hungry and have low blood sugar, that piece of chocolate will taste better to you than it would after a big satisfying meal.

It’s like in The Sims. When your character’s basic needs are met, the mood diamond hovering above her head glows a balmy green. This is homoeostasis. But if one or more of her needs is out of whack- say, she needs to go to the bathroom and her house is a mess- the crystal shades toward red. You can restore the happy green color by having her correct these problems. Sometimes, her “bladder” meter is a little high (she sort of has to go) but her house is a rat-infested hole. At that time, getting her to go to the bathroom will barely change her mood crystal’s color, but if she takes out the trash, the color will improve by so much more.

Cultural factors? Say your religion equates the eating of chocolate with damnation. Say you’re not a rebellious sort, you’re hungry and have low blood sugar, and you’re stuck on a deserted island where the only edible substance is chocolate. Is the chocolate going to taste good to you when you finally cave? Will you enjoy it? Will chocolate bring you the pleasure it will bring to someone else, if you know that hellfire awaits you? Not so much. That’s a pretty extreme example, but you get the idea.

According to the Fields Motivation-Decision Model of Pain, if your life is in danger, your brain will automatically downplay pain perception and concentrate on what’s more important for survival. If you’re sitting by the campfire nursing menstrual cramps and a grizzly happens along, you won’t be debilitated by pain- you will get up and run like hell.

This works via the descending pain modulatory system. In the brainstem, a circuit of cells moderates responses to pleasure and pain. Opiates, whether they’re made in your body or administered through drugs, act on this system to produce pain relief.

This descending system is subject to environmental influences, as well. According to this review article, “when subjects who were not expecting an injection of pain-relieving morphine received a hidden injection, its analgesic effects were significantly reduced.”¹ If you don’t think your pain will be relieved, it won’t. At least, not as effectively.

But that doesn’t mean just wishing for pain relief is going to bring it. Some people are unable to banish their pain at all. Sadly, this actually reduces their capacity to experience pleasure, leading to a vicious cycle. Fibromyalgia (generalized pain) and depression frequently occur together in patients, because the sustained pain they are in causes the pleasure rewards they do experience to be less potent.¹ If you’re in constant pain, and this inhibits you from fully enjoying pleasure rewards, both the pain and the depression will get worse together.

The reason for this is the reduced functionality of the phasic dopamine system, one of two neurotransmitter systems that work together to mediate pleasure and pain. The other is the µ-opoid system. With regard to pleasure, dopamine is what makes you want it, and µ-opoids are what make you like it when you get it. The µ-opoids also reduce the perceived unpleasantness of painful stimuli, e.g. bitter foods.

Three regions of the brain act as sites for the interaction between pain and pleasure signals: the nucleus accumbens (NAc), the pallidum, and the amygdala. In general, all three of them release µ-opoids when humans experience painful stimuli. Though their functions differ, these three structures have an interesting feature in common: each has two subregions that interpret pleasure and pain, very close together. This suggests the closeness of these two psychological states, and how interchangeable they can be, with just the right signals from the descending pathway of the brain.

Brave New World: When a culture of pleasure meets a religion of pain

[Spoiler alert! If you haven’t read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, go read it. Whether you end up reading the rest of this entry or not, read Brave New World. DO IT. ]

Think about the character of John Savage. John grew up on a reservation isolated from the distant-future world of technology, drugs and constant titillation. Many of the principles and practices of the new world ran contrary to the values he’d learned in his own culture, which stressed the virtues of self-denial and self-mortification. In the end, he was so disgusted with this world that he sought to escape the pollution of civilization. His masochistic orgy of atonement brought him pleasure, but then it turned into his succumbing to what he saw as sin with Lenina Crowne. When he woke up and remembered, he hanged himself.

This example, like my fictitious one about chocolate being against someone’s religion, is extreme. But it’s not entirely foreign to us, is it? When we, as cultural heirs of the Puritans, read this book, we don’t think John Savage is totally crazy. We understand the impulse toward self-denial, the idea of pleasure being unclean somehow. When I read the book, I reacted to the descriptions of the new world with a combination of fascination, longing, and disgust.

Some of this disgust was directed toward myself, for thinking that a world which negates pain and emotion and individuality can have any merits. I was repulsed by the idea that such a world could hold any intrigue for me, when it was devoid of all that leads to depth and meaning.

When John came on the scene, I could understand his internal conflict, his anguish. When he punished himself, I thought his reactions were a bit excessive, yet I understood. I thought of his suicide as a message that a society of pleasure and a culture of pain are irreconcilable.

“Even suffering can be rewarding if it has meaning to the sufferer.” ¹ Prior to his introduction to the New World, John Savage had experienced most of the pleasure rewards of his life as a result of what New World citizens would have called self-inflicted suffering. But his ritual self-mortification formed a large part of the basis for his self-worth. He was fascinated by the technology of the New World, curious about its capacity to provide unadulterated, instant pleasure. But when he experienced it, he felt dirty.  He sought the pleasure he was used to: the cleansing feeling of self-flagellation, hard work and sacrifice. He equated this drive with a sound mind.

Sound familiar? Thought so.

What does this mean for us? We who live by the Protestant work ethic, in a changing world which people often say is headed in a more hedonistic direction- how do we handle it? How important are cultural influences in determining how we interpret pleasure and pain? Would we be able to adapt to a Brave New World, or would the conflict between our sensory experience and cultural values send us into John Savage’s private hell?

Just something to think about.  

Sources:

1) Leknes, Siri, and Irene Tracy. “A common neurobiology for pain and pleasure.” Nature April 2008: 314-320. Electronic.

                2) Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper& Brothers, 1932. Paperback.

Alchemy: Not Just Harry Potter Stuff

            Alchemy.

            For most people, the word conjures images of crazy mystics using magic and hand-waving to try to turn lead into gold. In my head, alchemists looked like the witches of Macbeth, laughing maniacally as they tossed frightening-sounding ingredients into cauldrons with no apparent rhyme or reason.

            That is, until I attended a lecture by Dr. Lawrence Principe: Revealing the Secrets of Alchemy.

            Dr. Principe, Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, delivered this lecture at noon on Saturday, February 19th, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) convention at the Washington Convention Center in DC. He got his PhD in Organic Chemistry at Indiana University and went on to get a second PhD in History of Science at Hopkins. (He actually taught me organic chemistry in 2008, and although orgo didn’t agree with me at all, Principe was a very good professor.)

            Then what’s a guy like Principe, a consummate scientist, doing messing around with alchemy? Why does he study old alchemical texts- and why does he actually follow these recipes to see what happens?

            The answer is that, according to Principe, alchemists don’t deserve their bad rep. They should not have been eradicated from the history of chemistry. They weren’t a bunch of irrational spiritualists who followed hokey cultist practices and had no conception of the scientific method. In fact, according to Principe’s research, this image we have of them is a deliberate cover-up for the fact that they were actually very methodical, experimental, and clear-headed in their scientific pursuits.

            In the middle of his lecture, Principe showed pages from the private lab notebook of the alchemist George Starkey. These pages demonstrated exemplary notebook-keeping even by 21^st century standards- in fact, Principe remarked that he wished his own chemistry students could be as methodical and clear. Starkey recorded every step of his methods and performed several trials of every experiment. When the experiments did not turn out as planned, he’d note any known sources of error and speculate what else might have gone wrong. Then he’d modify his experimental design and keep meticulous notes on how his modifications altered the results.

            This clarity was only present in the private notebooks. Alchemy was outlawed by rulers, not (as I’d assumed) because they considered it heresy or witchcraft, but because they were worried that if alchemists succeeded in turning lead into gold, it would devalue the currency. Secrecy was important. Alchemists continued their experimentation and passed on their knowledge via symbolism-ridden pictures and “recipes” of heavily coded language. These recipes are perhaps the reason why historians, until about 30 years ago, considered alchemy to be so unscientific and silly. But Principe’s work at decoding the pictures has revealed that under the layers of allegory lie instructions for actual chemical processes.

This is an example of alchemical allegorical imagery from Wikimedia Commons. Nicolas Flamel, who was in fact a real alchemist and not just a Harry Potter character (as I'd imagined), had it inscribed on his tombstone. 

           

Principe showed us one example of a published picture and description, and his own results from following the outlined procedure in his own lab. This was the work of the Mercurialists, who believed that common mercury could be turned into “philosophical mercury,” which could then be used to turn lead into gold. The Mercurialists used an agricultural metaphor for this, stating, among other things, that philosophical mercury was a tree that bore fruits of gold.

Principe abandoned his preconceived notions of what is possible, as he always does when he carries out alchemical experiments, and set out to create this philosophical mercury. He deduced that it was a combination of mercury, gold, and antimony, and he combined them in the prescribed way and heated the mixture to almost the boiling point of mercury. He showed us pictures of before and after heating it to this temperature. Before, it looked like nondescript liquid metal in a round bottom flask.

            After, it looked like a lacy silver tree, reaching to the sky.  

            Not only that, but the silver tree of philosophical mercury melted in his hand, the way Boyle had said it would, in 1670.

“For a while, I thought that… lunacy had set in,” said Principe.

Until the 18^th century, there was no division between alchemy and chemistry. Chemistry also had a bad rep for the longest time: it had no place in the universities, and because it was dirty and smelly and dangerous and required working with your hands, it was considered more of an artisanal craft than a form of higher learning. The distinction between alchemy and chemistry was an artificial one, imposed by early-18^th-century scientists who wanted chemistry to have more credibility. They didn’t systematically or experimentally refute any of the alchemists’ theories- they merely abandoned them, and demonized them as unscientific, irrelevant, and totally distinct from the science they pursued. In reality, scientists like Newton and Boyle pursued alchemy secretly after it was no longer socially acceptable.

“I have not yet succeeded in making gold,” said Principe with a smile.

Although Principe probably won’t end up turning lead into gold from following the procedures of alchemists (who weren’t able to do it either: the only way it can be done requires particle accelerators, according to http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/amber/go336/lawrenz/index.htm#modalch), he has a great deal of respect for the ideas the alchemists developed. Though there was dissent on the numbers and identities of the Principles, alchemists generally believed that metals arose from the differential combination of the underground Wet Principle (mercury) and Dry Principle (sulfur). Gold was believed to have the perfect mixture of the Principles, and moreover, to be compacted together hard enough to be resistant to tarnish. Iron rusted, according to alchemists, because the Principles were loosely packed, allowing foreign bodies to come in and corrupt the metal’s structure. Although this information is now known to be untrue, the alchemists who labored under these ideas developed the most thorough understanding of matter of anyone at the time.

“[Alchemy] was a completely reasonable pursuit for its time,” concluded Principe. “It set the practical, technical, and theoretical expectations for the chemistry that followed. It is definitely a key part of the history of science.”