the aquarian conspiracy

"in our need to cope with everyday concerns, we forfeit awareness of the miracle of awareness"
-Marylin Ferguson

[disclaimer: everything i think about this is based on gatherings from Huxley's biography and Ferguson's A.C. theory. please, please please, you guys... hook me up with the rest of it.]

the Aquarian Conspiracy, so dubbed by Marylin Ferguson, is generally misconstrued as yet another mysterious and frightening undertaking by the CIA to flood the U.S. with psychedelics, and control subliminal brainwashing. being called a "conspiracy" doesn't really do much to battle this assumption. in actuality, the word "conspiracy" is used in a much less menacing regard, namely, its literal sense; to conspire means to breathe together. this was a movement of social synthesis in the "consciousness revolution" of the 1960-70's. "aquarian" refers to the aquarian age - following the current (violent Piscean) into one of love, light and liberation of mind [sidenote: this is the most flower-childesque thing you will ever catch me saying - please note that these are not my words and i say them with a healthy ( or unhealthy) degree of cynicism toward blind love and spiritual enlightenment]. in other words, the aquarian conspiracy is not a governmental heist. rather, it's a social paradigm shift resulting from the slow exposure of individual awareness. it just so happens that conspirators, being everywhere, were also staked in the CIA and could bring in Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond to spike the revolution with psychedelics. it's just too bad that the drug was given to the blind and dumb (yes, Hippies) who brought the revolution into the open carelessly and flippantly.

there was, of course, a CIA operation involved under Allen Dulles (a Rockafeller cousin, go figure). in the late 50's, an investigation began into the utility of LSD (developed by Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman) as a military weapon. oddly enough, Aldous Huxley's personal physician was recruited by Dulles to lead these investigations. as a side project, Humphrey Osmond (the physician), Huxley and some other dude with funding connections began investigating LSD as a therapeutic tool for mental disorders under the guise that mescaline (a similar alkaloid to LSD) produced a Schizophrenic model. this West Coast project resulted in Huxley recruiting his own cult of experimenters; one of these spiked the Zen Buddhism cult, another, the Hippie cult.

having jump-started the West Coast movement, Huxley went back to Boston to teach at MIT and birthed a similar team on the East Coast. during this time, he started another project with Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (Albert Hoffman's company in Switzerland) to contract the mass production of LSD under the CIA's chemical warfare investigation. and by the 60's, Dulles had made the purchase orders.

the reason for the bad rep of the Aquarian Conspiracy is that it emerged at the same time as the anti-war movement, the "flower child" cult of San Francisco and the manifested inundation of LSD, which was introduced by Huxley in his MIT courses as the window to consciousness.

i think we're on the verge of its second wave.

glycyrrhetinic acid

glycyrrhetinic acid (the potent sweetener of the licorice root) is an expectorant (a mucous thinner) that inhibits the activity of prostaglandin-metabolizing enzymes (causing lots of prostaglandin activity in the digestive system).

prostaglandins (the bitchinest of all hormones) work in concert with the immune system. their badass reputation comes from regulating classic core body fever. endogenous pyrogenic cytokines (interleukins, interferons, etc.), which are produced in excess in response to an invasive toxin or bacteria, stimulate the hypothalamus to synthesize prostaglandins that modulate the body's core temperature to enable activity of immune mechanisms which fight the pathogen (the reason you take Asprin to break a fever is because it inhibits the production of prostaglandins).

(and) the reason that prostaglandins are the bitchinest of all hormones is because they have such an extensive array of physiological activity through the body.

in the digestive system, the all-star fatty acid derivatives instigate mucous secretion from the stomach lining, both protecting and prolonging the lifespan of the columnar epithelium that so graciously allow for the digestion of food. ergo, tea from boiled licorice root, being concentrated in glycyrrhetinic acid which stimulates prostaglandin secretion in the stomach, is protectice against ulcers, inflammation and general rotting of the digestive tract. incomparably, my favorite medicine.

empty thoughts IX

incidentally, all this time that i've been drooling over the products of the gods of neurophilosophy, i've never really condoned or disputed any of their arguments. rather, i more or less take them in stride and create something new out of them. sometimes, arguments are that badass, what can you do? at the moment, however, i say "incidentally" because i happen to have come upon a precarious internal consensus about individuality.

i like the way Lewis Thomas puts it: multiple personalities is not a pathology - it's when they all clamor for conscious attention at once that they become a problematic condition.

nice, right? here's where it gets tricky for me. it is conceivable to me to believe in the capacity of a body to merge multiple selves, but i also favor the holism in collective consciousness of the universe. so what is it? are we all of the same energy using not only various bodies differently, but various circuits of each body differently? or are we denying the strength of fragmentation in assuming holism is the healthier, safer and more sane alternative?

the altruism consortia

"...to have no restraint from, no regard to others in our behaviour is the speculative absurdity of considering ourselves as single and independent, as having nothing in our nature which has respect to our fellow-creatures, reduced to action and practice. and this is the same absurdity, as to suppose a hand, or any part to have no natural respect to any other, or to the whole body."

-- i have a huge crush on Joseph Butler

*disclaimer: all chronology is flippant and estimated because i am slothful and have not thought about any of this since theory of knowledge class in high school.

the altruism debacle is ageless, with one of the more sinusoidal flux patterns of any of the philosophical redundancies. this seems a reflection of what generational mascot sits chair of the committee on altruistic behavior.

in the beginning - the 1850's - altruism was introduced as the diametric of egoism... by some dude whose name escapes me, probably because he's French. the conception of the word provided wind for the Hobbesian argument of self-interest as the evolutionary drive of all beings (which came at least a century before), at which time Hobbes was the committee chair, proclaiming from the grave that altruism itself was a demonstration of supreme egoism. sure, he had critics in Hume and Butler, but their projections of altruistic behavior as innate to both the individual and collective self did not rise to power until the Church adopted the altruism consortia in the late 19th/early 20th century.

under Popes Pius VIII-X (yes, i most definitley had to fact-check this one), altruism became the act of love for the sake of being one with God. from here, the Behavioralists took over not only the chair, but the committee majority. reverting to the era of Hobbes' reign, they effectively obliterated the remote connection between altruism and love (on which it was originally based, go ask Compte [huh, apparently i recall his name after all]) and redefined the act as "reckless curiosity." this was, in my harrowed opinion, in reference to the experimental foray into exactly how much tit one could get for tat. a Machiavellian endeavor, if you will.

giving credit where due, the Hippie movement did actually achieve something. tangential as it was (and I consider almost every lasting effect of their stint to be so), they monopolized the altruism consortia and brought back Christian altruism, replacing "God" with "self" and "love" with "collective consciousness" (or, psychadelics, if you prefer to be technical).

however, the reign was short-lived and power was redistributed to the Atheists (i may or may not be accurate in posting Dawkins at the stern, here, but i'm gonna anyway; its done out of reluctant respect). so here we are, withthe committee on altruism manned by those who have given up on surprised continuity of souls and, instead, mellowed Hobbes' altruism to a more gentle tool of survival; taking responsibility for all associated behaviors out of the hands of conscious creatures and placing it in their genes.

i don't necessarily disagree with the current consortia (see post on Microtubules and Intelligence), but my personal philosophy on altruism is a little more toward the end of irrational benevolence... which, i suppose, places me in the neo-Kantian vein. Nagel is our most prominent hope for the next phase shift in the altruism consortia, riding on the back of the forgotten and forlorn Empathetical movement (shudder).

we are not independent organisms; having a more developed intelligence than other species does not now make us exceptions to the evolutionary tactics that propagated that intelligence in the first place. we need our mothers, we learn by imitation, we thrive on continuity of selves. altruism is a mechanism to foster that continuity.

LHC and the God Particle

First of all, I am way, way too excited for Wednesday.

Murray Gell-Mann simplified the zoo of fundamental physical particles in the 1960's by identifying their similarities in their symmetries. All 80 (or something) types were made up of three quarks. In the late 60's, the first electron micrographs of protons were taken, finding within this fundamental particle three smaller particles of the correct charges, but of indiscernible structure. These quarks, together with the electron and electron neutrino are capable of explaining everything in the actual world. Among the things that remain unexplained is why there are three families of each of the aforementioned, which are identical in every respect except that they are of three different masses. How is it possible that there are, in perceivable existence, three versions of the exact same fundamental particle which perform the exact same function and have what appears to be the exact same structure?

There is another particle, called a Higgs boson, which - should it actually exist - answers the profound question of why and how things acquire different masses, why so many distinct fundamental particles can arise from the same three quarks, why unique particle interactions occur in particular fashions, and exactly which roles those forces play in our universe.

Particles gain different masses because of the different ways in which they interact with Higgs bosons. Essentially (and I'm not going to try to tackle the actual equations because my mind is feabile and my brain is exhausted), Higgs particles are dark matter. They fill every "empty" space in the universe, and as fundamental particles stream through the universe, those that are said to acquire mass are bombarded with Higgs bosons which slow down their streamline. Those particles which do not acquire mass (photons, etc.) are not impeded by Higgs particles... hence, nothing travels faster than the speed of light :)

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been designed (and under construction and legal debate since 2003) to see if the Higgs boson can be revealed. The problem with the Higgs boson theory right now is that it is just mathematical theory - there is no physical observation. The idea behind the LHC is that, as it is a particle accelerator, the collision of protons accelerated within it can result in the creation of a new particle. The energy created by the collision is proportional to a mass (this is the real meaning of E=mc^2), and so a new particle with a new mass can result.

This is why tomorrow is so fucking sweet. Tomorrow... Sept. 10, 2008... and more importantly, Wednesday... the LHC will be "turned on," and the first proton beam will be circulated through the tunnel. The Tevatron particle collider in the Fermi Lab outside Chicago is almost as powerful as CERN's LHC, and may have already shown the existence of the Higgs boson, but have not produced any data, as such. The idea of the LHC is to recreate the conditions up to milli-seconds following the Big Bang, and hopefully make strong suggestions about the nature of this minor event in history.

The identification of the Higgs boson would mean remarkable things for the entire world of physics, beginning with the completion of the Standard Model of particle physics. Specifically, the Higgs boson would give a distinct variable to the differences between massive and massless particles, thus making possible concrete suggestions (as opposed to theoretical) about the nature of the relationship between the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, weak and strong nuclear forces).

Ergo... more redefinition and tweaked theory of the Big Bang.

Boom.

REM and memory consolidation

consolidation of memories - being the enhancement and stabilization following encoding of information - primarily occurs during sleep. there are, as to be expected, several propositions as to the manner in which this takes place.

the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampal system, is said to mediate consolidation through enhancing innervation to the neocortex. it is proposed that this occurs in several possible mechanisms:

1) the MTL system consolidates by signaling the neocortex to form a new representation of information, and the neocortex subsequently imprints and stores

2) the MTL is the rehearsal mechanism, strengthening connections with the particular cortical regions so they are all activated when the experience responsible for the information input repeats in the future

3) the MTL encodes AND imprints memories into the neocortex. this final option suggests that once enhanced, the neocortex is the final repository for memories. long-term memory is then distributed by coactivation through the higher neocortices specialized for analysis, each contributing differently to the storage of the complete memory. in this way, the neocortex is primed to reconstruct the representation of the information from partial cues.

regardless of which of these mechanisms is more correct than the other, their common function depends on adequate sleep cycles. it has been shown that not only does consolidation occur primarily during slow-wave and REM sleep (Kandel 2001, Sei et al 2000), but also that MTL activity during the information encoding process decreases dramatically in sleep deprived subjects (Drummond et al 2000). both of these observations correlate with decreased cortical metabolism and reproducible memory deficit.

disruption of encoding and deficit of retention in sleep-deprived subjects map onto particular physiological correlates that pronounce REM sleep as crucial for the memory consolidation process. REM deprivation reduces excitability of hippocampal neurons responsible for imprinting information into the neocortex (Kandel). this, as you might imagine, directly impairs long-term potentiation (LTP), or decays any LTP that does occur [ aka, early-LTP is vulnerable to decay within 90 min if not pushed into late-LTP by excited hippocampal neurons which facilitate the genetic transcription of proteins which are biochemically responsible for the actual "long term"]. in addition to LTP, acetylcholine (ACh) accompanying slow-wave sleep just prior to REM mediates consolidation (Power 2004, see neato pic).

the other important gesture sustained by REM sleep is the production of several nerve growth factors, primarily NGF and BDNF. these are both key regulators of LTP (again referring to the strengthening of neural circuit connections in learning and memory formation). this means that their reduction in REM sleep-deprived subjects probably causes the impairment in memory consolidation - supported by the most drastic deficits occurring in the hippocampus.

apparently, episodic memory is most profoundly affected by REM sleep-deprivation... but we don't know why (Rauchs et al 2004). although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it had something to do with consolidation involving the prefrontal cortex (which has been suggested by almost everyone in the field to be the primary region of activation and most distinguishable candidate during episodic memory retrieval, and also during MTL mediated consolidation (see entry on "episodic memory and autonoetic awareness")). both the hippocampus and pfc are main players in episodic memory encoding and retrieval (id est, emotional memory depicting information in the context which it was learned). the other half of declarative memory, semantic, seems to involve a much different array of hippocampal efferent circuits. and although i don't actually know what the profiles of ACh, NGF or BDNF are in those circuits... i would imagine that they're also different from the activity seen in the circuits associated with episodic consolidation.

ergo, REM sleep: fighting amnesia since the evolution of the higher limbic system.

P.S.

do dreams arise from the stochastic hippocampal inputs to the neocortex?

did dreams evolve from the prolonged quiescent state in reptiles to promote calcium-dependent memory consolidation?

o.O

everything i love enlivens me to a nostalgia for some piece of life i never knew

... and yet, the nostalgia does not become ruinous when the thing that inspired it disappears or becomes a relic.

Georgia: I think I've reached a place where I can be happy enough with someone's existence to accept their disappearance from my life when the time comes

Wade: Are you referring to someone or something specific? Give me more.

Georgia: I mean in general - I was thinking about how some of my most treasured have drifted in a way that you would expect from casual acquaintances, and some come back intermittently and some don't - I don't have that aching feeling that accompanies heavy loss like I once did

Wade: You are getting used to people fading, that's a sad event

Georgia: Yes, but it's a nice feeling that I can be happy enough with periods of real love no matter their brevity and appreciate that I've been able to reciprocate them without being possessive of them

Wade: True, but it requires a lack of long term expectation, and people too often fall into that regard toward the nature of friendship

Georgia: I'm not worried about that happening. I don't enter into relationships with people with any expectation of their lasting forever, but I maintain the prospect of their becoming something important and treasurable

Wade: Have you always been this way?

Georgia: No, I spent my life being incredibly possessive and emotionally dependent on any love I could get my hands on.

Wade: ...and now, you are adapting to loss by learned helplessness. What will happen to you if you further develop this lackadaisical expectation of connectedness? You will become cold and sad. We are social creatures, and we crumble without connectedness.

Georgia: Don't call it helplessness, because sad and cold is the opposite of my apparent direction which is why I accept it at all. The connectedness does not disappear with the person or thing, is my point... which is why the love remains, made more fervent by weak nostalgia but also made pleasant by the absence of possessive defeat.

... maybe because those i love most are so grandiose - their own worlds - that i can conceive of our collision as being just emphatic and long enough to have made an impressionable entanglement of selves before ricocheting away - worlds gained and only grossly lost.