Monday, December 17, 2012

Sandy Hook Elementary massacre: Let's look beyond the guns.

In the wake of the horrific killing at 'Sandy Hook Elementary' school, the predominant question knocking on our minds is "what makes a person shoot at innocent kindergartners?" I know people are talking about tougher gun regulations, armed guards at school premises and what not. The fact remains, parents who fed breakfast to their kids and sent them school on that day, many of them didn't get them back. The reason? what could be the reason? Is any reason, reason-enough to even accept? Media constantly updating on the events taking place after the shoot-out, who thinks what, pro-gun or anti-gun etc. etc. What this society should really think at this time is ways to connect and reach out.  How we may prevent this kind of incidents from happening again? I mean there are mentally ill people everywhere, in every country. How many of them do mass murder? If we really want to look for reasons that cause this kind of ugly incidents, we need to look inside ourselves, what is hiding inside us. It is time we should take this effort to introspect and don't let the lives that are lost, become worthless. If we really take notice that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, those little ones who died on that fateful day, at least we will be able to attach some worth to the lives already lost. History will remember that American society changed after those little ones lost their lives. If you had the patience to read up to this, you are probably willing to read what I want to talk about in the following passages.

Let me refer to a news article published by ABC News on Jan 19, 2012 that says that one in five Americans suffer some kind of mental illness. That is according to a study published in 2010 by Substance abuse and Mental health services administration. Isn't that awesome? If you drop this kind of a statistics into the American society, how do you think they are going to react? They'll say "Wow...that's a big market for anti-depressants". Let's start selling mental health improvement products and get rich. This is the root cause of all your problems my friend. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we look at the world around us. It is this endless materialism, competition, lack of spiritual connection between us that leads us to the verge of insanity. I know many of us are religious, how many of us are spiritual for that real sense of the term? How many of us cared to look deep into ourselves and realize who we really are? Are we different from the homeless person on the street or the CEO of a big corporation who eats with a golden spoon? How many of us have unlocked the endless compassion, forgiveness and love dormant within ourselves? We haven't cared to. It is not because we cannot; we grow up in a way that prevents us from becoming human. We start sleeping separately from our parents as soon as we are born, so that our parents can have a good sex life. We don't spend our childhood playing with grandparents or uncles and aunts, instead we go to 'daycare' and start competing for toys and attention, learn fighting and grabbing stuff or else they will be taken. We go to schools where a lot of effort is given to teach us intelligent thinking, not developing 'emotional intelligence'. Accept it. Many of us haven't even heard of this term. We start believing that a career is to earn money, because that is what you need to live a fulfilling life. We need a nice car, a decent house, a pet that eats designer foods, a sexy girlfriend - who will be "neighbor's envy and owner's pride" (I quoted from a 'Onida' commercial from the 90s) and who will be our slave in bed. You need lots of money in your bank account too. the more the merrier. We are tricked into believing this is a good life. But no, it's not. This only takes us away from our natural human self. We start using supplements to have a great body, use enhancements, spike up our drinks with drugs, we get caught up so much in making our lives full of fun that we forget our spiritual self which is torn and injured every time we suffer an attack on our ego, every time our girlfriend leaves us for a newer pastures, every time we are laid off from a job, every time we are denied a credit for that wonderful vacation in Bahamas. My friends, try to understand, this is the cause of all the mental illness. Yes, I am talking about loneliness, sadness, depression, disorders leading to aggression, not Alzheimers or Parkinson's disease.

Now, let's look at the main aspect of our discussion - 'aggression'. According to researchers, the 'amygdala' in the vertebrate brain that belongs to the limbic system is the seat of all aggression humans display. Experiments done with individuals that has aggressive behavioral problems, show hyperactive amygdala. Surgically removing the amygdala or a part of the limbic system have greatly reduced aggression in those individuals. However, I wonder "aggression" which comes as a consequence of the 'fight or flight response' was initially a survival response in animal world. How come that is used in a different way in civilized societies?

My take on that, the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Our brain works through neural interactions called 'connections', billions of them, called neural network. It is just training that builds a new connection, a new memory, learning a new skill, sensations, feelings...everything. There are areas of brain called 'lobes' predominantly housing networks for a particular function. However, these areas do talk to each other. We can actually wire them or associate them by training or practice. If we train our brain to become amused by listening to a particular music, it will associate or build connections that will enable us to enjoy music in a particular way. These associations can be simple like one to one or multiple, it can occur in layers, it can operate beyond our conscious control when eliciting a response to a particular situation or emotion. So, I believe, it is we who have associated our seat of aggression with our seats of pleasure, companionship, sense of reward, sense of possession, sense of individual freedom, sense of demand, sense of thought, sense of deprivation, sense of shame, sense of everything. The area which gets activated as a survival or threat to survival response, now gets activated in response to any other of these seemingly innocent feelings. In other words, we have trained our brains to think that our survival is at stake if we cannot achieve a particular thing or if we are not proud of ourselves, or if we are not getting enough attention, or society is not taking us seriously. Although it is far from reality, only way our brain responds is to display enormous aggression towards the society. We want to kill....kill a lots of people to feel better, to feel that my survival is not threatened. Yes, we call this a mental illness. But, let's take a deep look into ourselves. The shooter was one of us, and yes, we don't discuss this a lot, but he killed himself at the end.             
    

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

What do the other sperms do?

I always asked this question. I asked it when I was studying animal reproduction in my baccalaureate course, I asked this when I studied fish reproduction in my Masters, I asked this during my PhD and even today, this question comes back every now and then whenever I see waste. Waste of endeavor, energy, and hard work. Is nature wasteful or in some ways this waste is needful?

The event of fertilization just requires fusion of two nuclei. One from the egg and one from the sperm. This is important to maintain diploid number of chromosomes in the new zygote. If it is any other way, it will give rise to aneuploidy and nature has mechanisms to abort any aneuploid zygote from implantation. Anyways, this is not the point I want to bring to your attention.

Millions of sperms travel a long distance through the vaginal canal and up to the uterus, just to be able to unite with the egg. Millions of them, not knowing who the lucky one would be, take the tedious course and spend a lot of energy just to be able to reach there and do the job. They are all equally potent, none better than the other one, have same genetic make up and coming from the same source. How do you pick the best one? You cannot. All of them are equally good. However, the one that gets chosen is just by chance. It is certainly not because he is better than the other ones. And now is the time for my question, what do the other sperms do? They just give up and die.

In human society people behave the same way. Success comes only to a few people if you measure success by rewards. However, nobody thinks that their other compatriots are equally good. The success they get is just by chance, not because they are better than their peers.

In the sperm example, if you have just one sperm and think that it will fertilize the egg, you are wrong. Yes! you need to have those millions of compatriots with you to be successful. They are important. Their mere presence is important in giving the whole process a culmination. That's why sometimes when I think that encouraging too many scientists or musicians or athletes for that matter is a wasteful spending, you only pick up the talented ones and they will be Nobel laureates, Grammy winners or Olympians...I am wrong. You actually need millions of them and all of them are important to creating a civil, intellectual, progressively social atmosphere for all the humans to live and we should be thankful for their struggles too and not just shower kudos to the award winners. In this case, we should not allow the others to give up and die because society doesn't reward them. We should harbor equal respect to all of them. Just because humans are not sperms!  

      

Barack Obama's re-election


Yes. "Four more years" that was the tweet from his account. I couldn't continue watching the news-cast as the results were pouring in and the statistics were re-calculated. I was tired from a long day's work and went to sleep. Of course I took my phone with me because I wanted the alarm to ring next morning near my ears to shake me up from my slumber. I told my wife, "Pennsylvania is blue now". She advised me to go to sleep as she had complete faith on the stupidity of the American people and in the defeat of Obama in their hands.

I was hopeful. Not only because this is the man who actually believes in what he stands for, but also he is the perfect symbol of the future America. These people need to re-elect him as their leader. Only he has the vision to see 20 years into the future and prescribe strategies to prepare for it. I wanted to know the future of the country my daughter is born into. What are the promises or challenges that are  in store for her as a Indian American. Will she be discriminated? Because she is not catholic or because she is a girl or she is not Caucasian?  Will America be able to lead the World after 20 years from now? Those were the questions waiting to be answered. This election will tell us not only about the next American President but also about the American people - how they are thinking about their own country's future - the demography, the social infrastructure, the very flesh and bone of how does it feel being an "American"?

And then my phone vibrated on my bed. It was a push notification from New York Times. Barack Obama gets re-elected. I happily went to sleep. The future won't be that bad for my daughter.....

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

where it may all lead to

Too much technology is taking us away from nature. The innovations are making life easy, existence more comfortable and convenient in the process decaying our capacities to cope with nature. But we cannot evade natural selection. Can we? Nature is too great a force to ignore. Look at Japan. They could resist the earthquake to certain extent but couldn't resist the Tsunami. This is just an example. Human curiosity and thirst for knowledge has propelled mankind into Scientific inquiry and we have come a long way now generating technologies that improve human life and health.

Considering science is nothing but a systematic understanding of how nature works, we are still far from grasping the wisdom. It is far too complicated probably for human comprehension. Thus, in my understanding, this whole approach of Western Science to develop innovative technologies to improve human life is misdirected. Humans should be left to Nature's care and selection. Although research should continue to understand Nature and its powers, it should not be directed towards developing technologies (read making money). It should target beyond that.