 Extinction Explained The Thursday Thesis - 17/10/2019 As a discipline and a protocol, science is in the business of proving itself wrong – or at least it should be. In an ideal World, all knowledge is considered to be contingent and subject to upgrade at any time by new and more provable ideas, based upon evidence. But often, new ideas which challenge the accepted wisdom are poo-pooed and dismissed for reasons which have more to do with academic tenure and money than science and evidence. Archaeology has a particularly hard time explaining why a good number of artefacts and numerous megalithic structures conflict with the accepted timeline for mankind and civilisation – despite the fact that only one of these anachronistic artefacts is sufficient evidence to contradict accepted theory. Nutrition advice has taken decades to sidle away from the old Food Pyramid built on the corrupt and shoddy “research” of Ancel Keys – the doctor who led the charge toward low fat, high carbohydrate diets in the US and later the World. Despite the shocking rate of obesity and heart disease, the medics and nutritionists clung like limpets to Keys’ hypothesis. Across the sciences and academia, professionals tend to like things to stay the same and to make changes slowly: large paradigm shifts are uncomfortable and can potentially make a career built on the accepted theory look particularly shaky. Against this backdrop I’m amused to watch science trying to sidle away from its previous insistence that genetics was supremely powerful in shaping how we live and die. For as long as I can remember the scientific line was “It’s in your genes...” and that you’ll have heart problems, die young, develop cancer or whatever ghastly condition is flavour of the month, based on the latest snippet of AGCT code ripped from the Human Genome Project. But it turns out that genes are not the be-all and end-all of life after all – who knew? There’s been a gradual loosening of genetics’ grip on things over the last decade or two, and the emergence of an over-arching field known as “Epigenetics”, meaning “upon genetics”. Epigenetics is the study of influences even more powerful than genetics – diet, exercise, behaviour, environment and so on. What should be trumpeted from the rooftops of every lab and schoolhouse is that we are not slaves to our genes – we have choices, whatever our genetic potential. Whatever hand we are dealt by our inheritance, we have the ability to materially affect our outcome: we are no longer the passive executors of our genetic code after all. Our genetics give us only potential outcomes, but it’s becoming obvious from the research that since we each have to power to choose how we live, what we eat, how we move and how we think – we each have some degree of influence over how our genetic code operates. Once upon a time, Geneticists told us we were destined to be victims of our genes, but the new Epigenetics frees us from the heaviest chains of genetic determinism. What a pity they couldn’t come up with a better name than “Epigenetics” – it sounds kinda like Big S Science can’t quite let go of Big G Genetics, or is it just me? © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected]
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 Leaping Gymnast or Squiggly "S" shape? The Thursday Thesis - 10/10/2019 When I was a freckly sprog I’d sit and watch the flames and glowing coals of my grandma’s open fire – it’s something I love to do, even now. Shapes change, bright spots flare and subside, and shapes shift to become.... Well, what exactly? More often than not it’s a face – not the face that my great grandma warned me about, because that was always the devil’s face I had to be careful of – or something that looked enough like a face for my eyes and brain to connect the dots of randomness until they began to resemble the familiar. We all do it – it’s a universal human trait with its own fancy name: pareidolia. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary it is “...the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern...” It turns out that we humans are wired to sort for the familiar and especially for other humans – which is no surprise given our evolutionary need to find food and a mate. But the most important word in that definition is “familiar” because we can manage what becomes familiar to us – it’s something we have control over. If we have love and security, that’s what we’ll expect to be around us and we’ll seek out love and security. Likewise, if we are surrounded by mistrust, hate, violence and division – such as our news programmes are crammed full of – then guess what...? Yep – we’re going to expect to find that everywhere we go. So when we begin to remove undesirable things from our lives (top tip: start with your television) that will begin to reduce our tendency to find those things in random events and objects. When we don’t have doom, gloom and depravity forced down our throats every day, then guess what – we see less of it in our everyday environment. Conversely, if we are surrounded by positivity and optimism, we will recognise those things in apparently random objects and occurrences, instead. So, looking at ambiguous images such as the ten inkblots of the Rorschach inkblot tests can indicate what a person’s biases are, as the viewer “projects” what they think should be present onto the random shape of the inkblot. So next time you glimpse a face in a cloud, or notice that a car’s front-end seems to wear a certain expression, relax – you’re not going mad, you’re just seeing things. And that’s ok by me. © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected]  The Thursday Thesis - 03/10/2019
As a spotty teenage guitar wannabe, all I knew about feedback was that it was a hideous, high-pitched scream emanating from my Marshall amplifier when I had the volume cranked and I was too close to the speakers. These days, my amps are smaller, my guitar playing slightly less bad, and electronic feedback much less common. But feedback is the bread-and-butter of daily life – it’s how our bodies respond to our environment without us even thinking about it, and how we decide upon which behaviours to adopt, continue or abandon. In fact, feedback is the core of human behaviour: look at any behaviour pattern and feedback will be present, one way or another. From our eating habits to our exercise patterns, sexual proclivities and spending habits (no connection between these last two), everything comes down to feedback. So what is feedback, how does it work, and how can we hijack ourselves to get more of what we what and less of what we don’t? In a nutshell, feedback is the tendency of a system - in this case, us – to respond to received information (sensations or feelings) in a consistent way in order to produce more or less of the incoming sensations. If we are receiving information we find pleasurable or positive – say, a delicious taste, sexual excitement, rewards or peer esteem – we will continue to perform the activity which produces those desirable sensations. This is known as Positive Feedback. And if the sensations being received are unpleasant or negative – for example, food we don’t like, pain, punishment or exclusion from our peer group – we will modify our behaviour to reduce or eliminate the unpleasantness. Freud’s Pleasure Principle is a pretty good summary of how feedback works: “people to seek pleasure and avoid pain”. That’s really the nuts and bolts of feedback – it’s pretty simple. So how do we hack our own feedback loops to be happier, fitter, wealthier? Just two: words: pay attention. Notice what is working for you and do more of it. And notice what isn’t working for you, then do less of it. It’s simple, and it only takes a moment of detached consideration and honesty to ask yourself the simple question “Is what I am doing now producing the kinds of results which will make me more like the person I want to become?” If the answer is “Yes”, do more of it and improve it. If the answer is “No”, stop doing it as soon as you possibly can. Suppose you’re mouth is watering at the sight of a yummy fresh doughnut... Before you wade in with all teeth blazing – just ask yourself “Is eating that doughnut going to help make me the sort of fit, slim person I want to be?” And be honest with yourself. If you're wrestling your guitar and getting nowhere, pause and ask yourself "is what I'm doing now helping or hurting my development and enjoyment on the guitar?" "Success leaves clues", as they say - and so does failure... If you spend your life doing things consistent with the actions of the person you’d most like to meet, you must – inevitably – become that person. © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] |
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