osprey_archer, posts by tag: science - LiveJournal

My latest NetGalley book is Suzanne O'Sullivan's Is It All in Your Head?, which I found interesting but frustrating, although the fact that it's frustrating is not really the book's fault.

The first reason that I found it frustrating is that I expected it to be about hypochondria, but there's actually only one chapter about that; most of the book is about psychosomatic disorders, which is interesting in a different way, but it's still frustrating to get a book you think will be about one thing and discover it's about another. (In hypochondria, while there are often physical symptoms, it's the anxiety and not the physical symptoms that are debilitating; a psychosomatic disorder has debilitating physical symptoms with a psychological cause.)

But it's also frustrating, and O'Sullivan herself is clearly frustrated with this, that the medical community doesn't understand psychosomatic problems at all and also doesn't seem to be interested in understanding, despite the fact that something like 20% of patients have problems that may be psychosomatic in origin. If 20% of patients presented with any other problem you'd think the medical community would be falling all over itself to figure out exactly how it worked, but as it's just psychosomatic, well then! Why bother?

The medical community (and indeed the lay community) tend to believe that the only "real" causes are physical causes, so if someone is for instance having debilitating seizures, it's only "real" if it's epilepsy. The fact that the sufferer is debilitated by their seizures apparently isn't real enough.

O'Sullivan is a neurologist, and neurologists have very clear and specific tests they can do to detect different kinds of seizures, so she can diagnose with a great deal of accuracy whether a seizure is epileptic or dissociative (which is another word for psychosomatic in this case). And in fact many of her patients with dissociative seizures do stop having seizures, sometimes as soon as they receive the diagnosis and sometimes after getting psychiatric help, and after they've been taken off their epilepsy medication. The cure seems to me to prove O'Sullivan's diagnosis was correct.

In fact, it struck me that a psychiatric cure seems like the only way, at the moment, to prove that an illness is psychosomatic: otherwise it's not clear at all whether it's psychosomatic or caused by some physical problem that we can't measure. I particularly wondered this in the cases of medically inexplicable paralysis that O'Sullivan examined: the medical establishment couldn't find a cause, but unlike with the dissociative seizures, the diagnosis of a psychosomatic complaint didn't help the paralysis sufferers.

But at the same time I wonder if my doubt is simply that paralysis seems so dramatically debilitating that it's hard to believe that it could be psychosomatic. And yet if you'd asked me before I read this book, I would have been doubtful that someone could have a psychosomatic seizure disorder, because seizures also seem so dramatic. So the fact that it seems to defy common sense may not prove anything except that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

In any case, all this seems like yet another good reason why the medical establishment ought to seriously investigate psychosomatic complaints: not only could they help sufferers, but they could probably also get better at distinguishing psychosomatic illness and illness with a physical cause we don't know how to find yet.

But at the moment psychosomatic symptoms seem to have fallen between the two stools of physical and psychiatric medicine.

***

The book also talked briefly about Munchausen's syndrome, and O'Sullivan made the point that in fact people with Munchausen's are sick, that it is a mental illness, and that most of us don't consider that fact because basically we find the idea of pretending to be sick so disgusting.

A cornucopia of links.

First, We Aren’t the World, which is about the fact that recent anthropological research shows that people in different cultures often respond to psychological tests like ultimatum games very differently than the Americans from whom many psychology researchers have drawn their samples and their conclusions about human nature.

Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

Or, as my government professor used to say, “Studying the US system to learn about government is like studying platypi to learn about mammals.”

Super interesting!

On a less high-minded note, sineala sent me this article: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Probably Had Sex Once, which, well, what it says on the tin. I share this because the article is hilarious - ”This is a gift. You do realize that, don’t you? History has reached out to you specifically and given you a gift.” - and also because I feel that someone (someone else, someone who cares about Wilde or Whitman) should totally make this story happen.

In fact, someone already nominated Wilde and Whitman for Yuletide! So there is a golden opportunity right there.

And finally, a how-to for Kirsten braids. Yes! At last I can emulate Kirsten Larsen, the American girl with the most iconic hairstyle.

I am thinking of saving this for a St. Lucia Day party in December. I can make saffron buns! I can figure out a way to put a wreath of candles on my head! Or at least a wreath of holly! I have yearned for this day since I was seven.

Here's a cool link for you today: Beluga Whale "Makes Human-like Sounds" It's about a beluga whale which, yes, taught itself to make human-like noises. And there's audio! And indeed, it sounds very human-like.

Not, mind you, intelligibly human-like yet. There are no actual words. But after all, babies don't start with actual words either; they, like the whale, babble.

Maybe someday we'll be able chat with whales! Using words! Wouldn't that be amazing? It would be even cooler than sign language with apes. Because whales. Talking whales. We could exchange poetry! (You know whales must have poetry.) Also possibly apologize for that whole whaling thing in the nineteenth century.

English may have too many consonant strings to be a good candidate for interspecies communication. Maybe Spanish or Japanese?

More elephants! I’ve got kind of an elephant thing going here. Most recently I’ve been reading Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, which is good but frustrating.

On the one hand, there’s a lot of interesting information here - elephants can coordinate their movements with other elephant groups from over four miles away, for instance, communicating through sounds too low for humans to hear. (Humans can feel the sounds, though, like the deep reverberations of a church organ.) And much that’s horrifying: when hunters cull elephant herds, they always take care to kill all the elephants they find in one place. Out of kindness. So the elephants left behind aren’t traumatized.

I suppose from a certain point of view that is kind. Which makes it horrifying.

What I find frustrating - and I realize this is as much a result of my own rationalist biases as anything else - is that the book is sprinkled with dreams and general mysticism. A lot of animal writing has this streak of mysticism, which is one thing in a memoir about a pet cockatiel or whatever. But this memoir is supposed to be more or less scientific, so what are the dreams doing there?

Especially given that Payne doesn’t seem to take them entirely seriously. One of the earliest dreams, just after Payne realizes that elephants communicate through infrasound, features the elephants telling her that they didn’t tell her about their secret communication method so she could tell just anybody.

And then Payne...proceeds to tell everybody about the elephants’ secret communication method, and never refers to the dream again. No sense of guilt for breaking faith with the dream elephants? Why even bring the dream up if she didn’t think it mattered? Her forward suggests that she included these dreams out of a desire for completeness, but the book would have been stronger without them. Good books are created as much by leaving things out as by putting things in.

A couple of books I’ve been reading, about fossils and England and elephants and Rome.

The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaur and Paved the Way for Darwin, by Christopher McGowan

This book has the most misleading title ever. If the fossilists were ever seeking dragons, they’d certainly gotten over it by the early 19th century; but for the title page, the word dragon never appears in the book.

Tragic lack of dragons aside, this is actually a pretty good book. I mean, it’s got DINOSAURS. Which are not dragons, but still, a good consolation prize. Plus, nineteenth century scientists are a marvelously eccentric bunch. McGowan does a great job conveying their personalities, kindly but without sentimentality toward their flaws, and balancing their personal stories with the tales of their discoveries.


The Cowboy and His Elephant: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship, Malcolm MacPherson

Short version: too much cowboy, not enough elephant.

Longer version: This really ought to be called The Hagiographic Account of the Saintly but Nonetheless Awesomely Manly Cowboy Who Took in an Orphaned Baby Elephant. Bob Norris, the cowboy in question, may indeed be all that and a bag of chips, but breathlessly adoring accounts of flawless people are awfully boring.

Especially when they take up space that could otherwise be occupied by elephants. Because elephants are awesome.

A tragic and beautiful elephant story, from Marina Belozerskaya’s The Medici Giraffe, and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (which I meant to review, but never got around to; it’s fascinating but unnecessarily meandering):

Hoping to restore his fading prestige, the Roman general Pompey put up a four-day-long games extravaganza at the Circus Maximus. He brought in gladiators, lions, leopards, giraffes, exotic animals of every kind, with a few dozen elephants as his piece de resistance.

But the elephants, realizing that they were doomed, refused to fight. Instead they trumpeted in such despair that the bloodthirsty crowd pitied them, and demanded that they be spared.

Pompey had the elephants slaughtered anyway. When he fell from power soon after, the people of Rome said it was the curse of the elephants on him.

A couple of book reviews, because I post nothing but book reviews these days. I have other posts I mean to write! About Downton Abbey and Fruits Basket and The Social Network! Seriously, I've been meaning to write about The Social Network since December. The angst! The betrayal! The fandom, which apparently saw a completely different movie than I did! Where to even begin?

But for now, a couple of book reviews.

1. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, by James McPherson

I know nothing about the Civil War. As I'm going to be a Ph.D student in American history next year, this is a little worrisome, so I decided to try to remedy the situation.

This is a very good starting point. McPherson is famous for his Civil War histories, and with his lucid, incisive writing (he can even make battle tactics make sense! Without the use of maps!) it's easy to see why.

There are a great many points I could discuss about this book, but that one that sticks out at me is McClellan. McClellan was the general of the Union's most important army for the first few years of the war. How he hung on that long I do not know, because he was the most frustrating, incompetent, unwilling to attack general ever. Lincoln keeps sending him "MCCLELLAN ATTACK LEE'S ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES" telegrams, and McClellan keeps not attacking, but somehow it takes nearly three years before anyone fires him. Why? Why? WHY?

Apparently in person McClellan had tremendous charisma, but it doesn't come through in the paper trail he left behind. In his letters, he sounds like a petty, peevish megalomaniac with a messiah complex.

2. Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell.

I wanted to read Mitchell's new book, The Vespertine, but the library doesn't have it because the library doesn't have anything, so I read Shadowed Summer instead.

It's a beguiling mixture of things I love and things I hate. On the plus side, it's about two best friends - Iris and Collette - solving a mystery in their small Louisiana town of Ondine, which is so wonderfully described that you can feel the heat and the butterfly weed. Ondine feels like a real place; I don't know enough about Louisiana to know if it feels like a real Louisiana place, but it feels like someplace you could walk through. And a ghost story, to boot!

In the things I hate column, a love triangle. A love triangle where Iris and Collette like the same guy, no less! WORST KIND OF LOVE TRIANGLE EVER.

It's somewhat salvaged because Iris doesn't like the boy that much (half the time, she hates him for distracting Collette), and because Iris makes the right choice in the end - my best friend is more important than a guy I won't remember in two years. But still. Why love triangle, why?

Did you know that there's a mollusc that secretes a fiber that can be knitted into gloves? That kangaroo rats, gerbil-like creatures with kangaroo legs, really exist? And that aye-ayes look like they are the messengers of Satan?

All these things and more I learned yesterday, because we went to La Specola - the Florentice Museum of Zoology and Natural History, which is COMPLETELY AMAZING. They have tens of thousands of specimens, which are interesting purely in themselves, but also little side exhibits that show all kinds of fascinating things.

Camouflage butterflies, in situ on the bark and branches they use to hide.

Examples of all the different shapes of eggs, accompanied by different shapes of nests. (Some of them look like baskets. I wonder if this is where people got the basket idea.)

A primates display, with a plexiglass case for the great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutangs - and an open case, for the visitor to get in and complete the set.

We went because my friends who were here are both med students, and wanted to see the wax anatomical models. It's not an obvious thing to do in Florence, but it's been my favorite so far.

This is why you should go to a school with a conservatory:

"War and Peace?" I said.

"Shaiza!" Jessica shouted - she'd promised to bring it to Russian class. "Come by my room after class," she said - "I live in Rosemary."

"Um," quoth I, who have lived four years on campus without realizing we have a Rosemary.

Jessica took pity. "It's one of the decommissioned frat houses," she said. "By Sage."

And our ethnomusicologist piped up: "Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley sage, rosemary and thyme!"

***

Also, a tidbit from geology class. (Which, btw, is awesome. We have weekly field trips. I LOVE FIELD TRIPS.)

The Earth's core is iron, mostly molten with a solid center. The molten iron flows around the center, and the current creates the earth's magnetic field which makes life possible by protecting us from space radiation.

But when scientists first tried to figure out the composition of the earth, they miscalculated. They had thought the Earth was hollow, and now concluded it was incredibly dense: so much so, that the core must be solid gold.

Evolutionarily speaking, birds are dinosaurs, mushrooms are animals, and fish don't exist. (Or cows are a fish. Take your pick.)

In the eyes of the Rofaifo of New Guinea, the giant flightless cassowary bird is a mammal.

And the face of Linnaeus, the creator of the first scientific taxonomic system - a man so egregiously in love with himself that he pronounced his system "a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much" - is sold in Sweden, sculpted in marzipan, for your dining pleasure.

I've been reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, an entertaining, eminently readable overview of the much-neglected art and science of taxonomy. It's full of delicious trivia like this, and gives a swift overview of basically everything about taxonomy ever besides.

She covers the history of scientific taxonomy, the different (but surprisingly similar) folk taxonomies in use all around the world, psychological studies of people who through brain damage have lost their ability to recognize living things, and posits the existence of an innate human ability - like Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, but for taxonomy - to order plants and animals into usable hierarchies, an ability she calls the "umwelt."

( The umweltCollapse )

I picked this up on a lark, but I ended up enjoying the foray into popular science so much that I'm looking for more books in the genre. Does anyone have recommendations?