Saturday, March 5, 2016

The Heart Has A Mind of Its Own, reprint

Here's a reprint of an excellent article on the brain-heart connection. I'm also embedding a 45 minute youtube video on the same topic called

"Pure Science Specials - Of Hearts and Minds."

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Modern Research Reveals Your Heart Does Have a Mind of Its Own

March 05, 2016

By Dr. Mercola

In the film “Of Hearts and Minds,” science documentary filmmaker David Malone explores the human heart, juxtaposing the modern scientific view of the heart as a mere pump, versus its long history as a symbol of love and the center of innate wisdom and human character.

The film starts off in an operating room where open heart surgery is taking place, and Malone interviews Consultant Surgeon Francis Wells, who talks about the mechanistic and bioelectrical workings of the heart.

On the other side, there’s the poetic view of the heart as a source organ of love, with an intelligence all its own. In Wells’ view, the heart is a pump, and nothing more.

You can replace your heart with an artificial one, and it won’t affect your ability to love. Yet the idea that your heart is somehow an emotional organ remains.

The Heart — An Organ of Truth and Emotion

Sayings like “I love you with all my heart,” and “my heart swelled with joy,” or the reference to someone being “broken-hearted” or “cold hearted” — how much of this poetic language is based on something real?

Are these kinds of sayings references to something biologically true, stated in poetic terms?

This is the question Malone seeks to answer in this film, and the reason he thinks the answer may be important is because he believes the way we see our heart is a reflection of how we view ourselves as human beings.

The ancient Egyptians saw the heart as an organ of truth. And indeed, your heart does seem to be able to tell you the truth about how you feel and what you think is right or wrong. When you lie, for example, your heart rate tends to speed up.

As the film goes on, Malone scours the latest science, to find out whether ourfeelings and emotions really come from our brains, or whether they might actually originate in our hearts.

For starters, Leonardo Da Vinci discovered how the blood flowed through the heart, and how the swirling vortexes within the heart’s chambers worked withthe heart, opening and closing the valves with each heart beat — a far cry from the mechanistic view of the heart as a simple single-stroke pump.

Da Vinci’s drawings and experiments reveal a harmonic beauty — as much a piece of art as a machine.

The ‘Brain’ Within Your Heart

David Paterson, Ph.D. a professor at Oxford University, straddles the two areas of the brain and the heart. His work shows that your brain is not the sole source of your emotions, but indeed, your heart and brain work together in producing emotions.

Your heart actually contains neurons, similar to those in your brain, and your heart and brain are closely connected, creating a symbiotic emotional whole. As explained in the film:

“When your heart receives signals from the brain via the sympathetic nerves, it pumps faster. And when it receives signals through the parasympathetic nerves, it slows down. “

While this seems to support the view that the heart simply follows the orders of the brain, the reality is far more complex. Because your heart also contains thousands of specialized neurons, predominantly located around the right ventricle surface, forming a complex network. Why did nature put them there?

Neurons are what allow your brain to form thoughts. So what are they doing around the right ventricle of your heart? While much about the neurons in your heart is still unknown, one thing is sure — the “brain” in your heart communicates back and forth with the brain in your head. It’s a two-way street.

The Neurons in Your Heart Makes Decisions Too

In the film, Professor Paterson shows a piece of heart tissue from a rabbit — not the whole heart, just a piece of the right ventricle, where the neurons are clustered.

Kept in a tank with nutrients and a steady flow of oxygen, this suspended piece of heart tissue beats all by itself, even though it’s not attached to a living organism, and there’s no actual blood pumping through it.

By sending an electrical impulse into this tissue via an electrode, Professor Patterson demonstrates how the heart tissue immediately slows its contractions; a “decision” made by the neurons in the tissue in response to the stimulation.

This elegant little experiment shows that it’s the neurons in your heart that decide how the heart will behave, not the neurons in your brain. What Professor Patterson is finding again shifts our view of the heart back toward its more poetic and philosophical origins.

As Malone says:

“The heart is a pump that does respond when the brain asks it to, but it is not enslaved to the brain. Its relationship to the brain is more like a marriage ... with each dependent on the other. It seems science is now restoring to the heart something that rightfully belongs to it: Our emotions.”

Intense Negative Emotions Puts Your Heart Health at Risk

The interplay between your brain and heart can be seen when looking at how your emotional and mental outlook colors your health — especially your heart health. Intense anger, for example, boosts your heart attack risk five-fold, and your stroke risk three-fold.

Intense grief after the loss of a loved one also raises your risk of having a heart attack. The day immediately following your loss, your risk of a heart attack goes up by 21 times, and remains six times higher than normal for several weeks.1

Research also shows that people exposed to traumatic experiences, for example, combat veterans, New Orleans residents who went through Hurricane Katrina, and Greeks struggling through financial turmoil, have higher rates of cardiac problems than the general population.

In one such study,2 which involved nearly 208,000 veterans aged 46 to 74, 35 percent of those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) developed insulin resistance in two years, compared to only 19 percent of those not diagnosed with PTSD.

PTSD sufferers also had higher rates of metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors that raise your risk of heart disease, such as high body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. More than half (about 53 percent) of veterans with PTSD had several of these symptoms, compared to 37 percent of those not suffering with PTSD.

A Positive Outlook Reduces Your Heart Attack Risk

If negative emotions have the potential to harm your heart, it would stand to reason that positive emotions may heal it, and this indeed seems to be the case. In a study 3 of nearly 1,500 people with an increased risk of early-onset coronary artery disease, those who reported being cheerful, relaxed, satisfied with life, and full of energy had a one-third reduction in coronary events like a heart attack.

Those with the highest risk of coronary events enjoyed an even greater risk reduction of nearly 50 percent. This was true even when other heart disease risk factors, such as smoking, age, and diabetes, were taken into account. Separate research has similarly found that:

· Positive psychological well-being is associated with a consistent reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD)4

· Emotional vitality may protect against risk of CHD in men and women 5

· Cheerful heart disease patients live longer than pessimistic heart patients 6

· Very optimistic people have lower risks of dying from any cause, as well as lower risks of dying from heart disease, compared to highly pessimistic people 7

Yes, Your Heart Also Affects Your Mind

In one test, Malone is shown a series of images of neutral and frightened faces, some synced in time to his heartbeat, and others not synced to his heart. Interestingly, when the frightened faces were shown in sync with his heartbeat, he perceived them as being more intensely frightened than when shown out of sync with his heartbeat.

What this test showed was that how his mind processed the perception of fear was affected by his heart. When his brain processed the image in sync with his heart, there was a greater “resonance” in the emotional output.

By looking at the brain scans taken during the test, the researchers are able to pinpoint the precise brain region affected by the heart, namely the amygdala — an area known to be associated with threat perception. Your amygdala processes fear in combination with the signaling from your heart. This brain-heart connection is also at work when you experience feelings of compassion and empathizing with other people’s emotional states.

As Malone says, “it is our heart working in tandem with our brain that allows us to feel for others ... It is ultimately what makes us human... Compassion is the heart’s gift to the rational mind.”

Monday, February 1, 2016

A Simple Explanation of Transfigural Mathematics and Natural Inclusionality

A few days ago a comment on one of my articles, Yearning for the Pleroma , opened my eyes to a line of published thought I should have heard about by now but hadn't. I deeply appreciate this reader for taking the time to leave me the following:

Your example of paper being the ground reminds me of this youtube video by Dr Rayner:[http://youtu.be/yVa7FUIA3W8]

and

Here's one of Dr Rayner's papers. Essentially, for him (and me) Space itself all around and within is the infinite inductive source...but I need others to examine this. There is relation to Toridal model. [https://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/math/logic/transfigural-approach-to-evolutionary-origin]

The first link, to this short video by Dr Rayner, presents an easy-enough introduction to the concept of natural inclusionality. And, yes, the paper model used in Rayner's nifty little demonstration is conceptually the same as the paper used as the ground in my own posters of Gnostic cosmology.

In my drawings of Gnostic cosmology, the paper itself is likened to the ground state of the Universe (aka God the Father) and the drawings on the paper are the figures differentiating out of, but staying one with, the Father.

I am glad the commenter asked about its possible relation to toroidal models, because the Simple Explanation's toroidal cosmology turns out to be closely aligned with the natural inclusionality model and what they call transfigural math.

Here's the simplest definition of natural inclusionality I could find on the Inclusional Research Forum and Learning Space:

"The co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context"

The idea behind natural inclusionality is that nature is not divided into the neat, straight-sided and artificially bounded spaces that conventional mathematics and logic depend upon for their formulae to work. Nature is interwoven and interdependent, and it rarely stops moving long enough to take a traditional measurement of singular characteristics. The solution provided by inclusionality is to view nature as a fluid state, with all objects and subjects included within the same fluid flow. Once you are able to shift your perspective to see this fluidity, you recognize "a naturally continuous dynamic geometry of fluid flow, in which spatial and informational phases are mutually inclusive, not mutually exclusive" (Shakunle, L.O. and Alan D.M. Rayner, 2016).

Transfigural geometry is a "post-Euclidean" geometry "based on the logic of 'the included middle,' 'inclusionality', whereby material 'content' is a dynamic local inclusion of non-local spatial context and vice versa" (Ibid.). For those of you who enjoy reading logic and math, the paper cited here goes into detail regarding the logic of transfigural geometry and its ability to describe and better represent the dynamic interplay of material objects as natural energy flow. At its simplest, transfigural geometry is represented by the figure below:

This figure is called the "superchannel" of transfigural geometry. It represents a line that has been transformed from discrete points to local spheres of non-local spatial influence, called 'zeroids'. (Shakunle, L.O. and Alan D.M. Rayner, 2008)

Readers of this Simple Explanation blog will recognize the above figure as a variant of my own toroidal doodles --

in which the "superchannel" depicted by Shakunle is formed through the interplay of infinitely nested toruses.

Now, let's look at some quotes from Shakunle and Rayner and translate them into Simple Explanation terms. That way, if you are already familiar with transfigural math and natural inclusionality you will see how it relates to the Simple Explanation's toroidal cosmology. I'll highlight the quotes and their Simple Explanations, and link them to the original Simple blog articles for fuller explanations.

"At the philosophical core of transfigural mathematics is the recognition of two distinct but mutually inclusive and co-creative kinds of dynamic influence at work in the cosmos: figural and transfigural. Figural influence is energetic, resistive and brings local distinctiveness--but never complete discreteness--to natural, variable viscous flow-form. Transfigural influence is non-resistive, spatial and present everywhere, without limit" (Shakunle, Rayner).

In Simple Explanation terms, the figural is the stuff of our universe--the aggregations that bubble up, combine, and form Units of Consciousness that distribute themselves at larger and smaller scales throughout creation.

Transfigural refers to the "meta" level consciousness that forms the conscious ground that underlies and transcends our universe and its material and electromagnetic components--what the Simple Explanation refers to as the Universal Unit of Consciousness, the universal womb.

"Transfigural influence can be thought of implicitly as spreading radially, from 'zero identity centres' (called 'zeroids' in transfigural mathematics) distributed everywhere, although this radial influence cannot be manifested explicitly without figural influence" (Shakunle, Rayner).

The Simple Explanation cosmology sites these "zeroids" as the singular point at the center of the torus. As the Universal Unit of Consciousness brings information flowing inward, toward the center of the torus, passing through the shared middles of every thing, past the point of here and now, and then as history downward and back around again to become future potential. At the same time, information passing through the shared middles explodes inward into our physical reality, bringing coherence, form, and consciousness into every thing in the universe.

"The underlying dynamic geometry of natural flow form and transfigural mathematics is hence primarily non-linear and space-including... Through the interplay of inseparable transfigural and figural, radial and tangential dynamic influence, spiral, linear and annular form emerges fluidly from primarily spherical form as a local figural inclusion of non-local transfigural influence" (Shakunle, Rayner).

I, of course, would amend their primarily spherical forms to read primarily toroidal forms, which contain within themselves both conventional and non-Euclidean geometries, and which otherwise fully satisfies the spherical requirement of natural flow form.

At this point, transfigural math and natural inclusionality take an interesting turn toward talk of gravity, love, and creative potential:

"Transfigural space is not only gravitational but it is also a dynamic presence of love and creative potential" (Shakunle, Rayner).

One-in-Other as a flow translates therefore to One knowing what it is through others, alongside One, and through these others, to and through All with All also reaching inside One. This also translates to the origins of human identity, the place of the person in society and the world, and how human beings are in Nature and Nature in them and how all are included in Space, a common habitat that includes them. The middle, in this transfigural outlook, is not only included but every fluid logic number which is distinct, flows in what comes before and after it that also flow in it..." (Shakunle, Rayner).

A Simple Explanation cosmology proposes that there is a Unit of Consciousness attached to every piece of material of our universe, and it is this inherent consciousness arising from the One consciousness of the shared middle that has an attractive quality that pulls it toward others in search of aggregation into larger and larger forms. We call that attractive quality "gravity" when it relates to physical matter, and we call that attraction "love" when it relates to Units of Consciousness.

"Samedifference--Its Sustaining Spirit:

In the oppositional logic of OR, it is lose, out, win, remain. There are no such grounds for conflict in samedifference. Underlying samedifference is the spirit of sharing: giving, receiving, and passing on in a natural flow of energy. There is no mutually exclusive game of winners and losers. In samedifference, the greatest pleasure comes from bringing joy to the heart of the other through sharing in the gift and promise of life as it waxes and wanes, like a child belonging in the community of a village that belongs in the community of the world and ultimately limitless cosmos that is its home."

As is the case with transfigural math and natural inclusionality, the Simple Explanation cosmology inevitably leads one to embrace others in love. We call this The Simple Golden Rule: Your job is to reach out to others with love, aid, and information for the betterment of all.

I hope this article hasn't muddied the waters in my attempt to relate these two different ways of looking at the unity of our universe. I urge you to read my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, for the clearest, most logical exposition. Feel free to leave a Comment and I'll do my best to give a simple answer.

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

Friday, January 29, 2016

New Scientific Proof--The Mind Is Not the Brain

Science typically asserts that human consciousness, including the sense of "I" and the observing "mind," are by-products of the material that makes up the brain. Yet, according to the Simple Explanation, scientists make a fundamental error when they equate the brain with consciousness or the mind.

Now, at last, a well-designed scientific study has proven that memory retrieval takes place far quicker than neurons can fire. A study published in the Journal of Neurosciences this month [The Journal of Neuroscience, 6 January 2016, 36(1): 251-260; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2101-15.2016] has demonstrated using human subjects that when we remember an event, the sensory information invoked by that memory happens so quickly the study's authors named the phenomenon "very rapid reactivation." And by "rapid" they mean information is acquired faster than the brain's ability to fire and transmit signals through known neuronal channels.

Here is an excellent analysis of the scientific finding that I'm reposting from the Alternative-Doctor site, by Keith Scott-Mumby. I agree with Scott-Mumby's conclusions that this study offers proof that consciousness resides outside the brain, independent of brain function.

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Begin repost from http://alternative-doctor.com/mind-stuff/brain-science/ :

The End of Brain Science As We Know It Jim

by PROFKEITH

You have heard and read me saying for years that brain and mind are not the same; that the extended mind is outside the physical body; that memory is in the surrounding encapsulation of the body, not in our tissues (which leads to the concept of a low-level “cellular memory”).

Mechanistic brain science, on the other hand, insists that memory and cognition all take place within the brain, because “it must be so”. There is nothing non-physical, they say (which in a way is true!)

Here’s an interesting study (Nov 2015) that makes it clear that memory function (recording and retrieval) is so fast that neurons and synapses cannot possibly be involved in the process, except maybe peripherally, but certainly not as the causal agency.

Ecphory, a word you will encounter in a moment, was given us by brilliant German researcher Richard Semon (1859-1918), who also coined the term “engram” for a cellular memory trace. We all think in terms of memory recording, of course—the so-called engram, from the process of engraphy. But don’t forget there has to be memory retrieval too, otherwise it’s not available! The retrieving of memories Semon named ecphory, or awakening of the previous engramic record.

Here is a synopsis of the study findings:

They conducted two experiments with human participants. In the first, they “encoded” the memory (engraphy) with some right or left tags that would be associated with that exact memory: these are called “retrieval cues”.

There was then a memory test with the retrieval cues presented dead center, instead of to the right or left. EEG showed brain activity leapt into life very early (around 100- 200 milliseconds), on one side or the other. For completeness I should add that the activation was on the contralateral side; that would be expected if you bear in mind that the left side is processed by the right-brain and vice versa.

This showed, in the words of the researchers, there was a clear pre-conscious element to memory and it was very fast.

As a refinement, they used rhythmic transcranial magnetic stimulation to interfere with early memory retrieval processing, stimulating either the right or left brain separately. The result was interference with the memory that had its retrieval cue on the opposite side.

To quote the researchers, “These results demonstrate, for the first time, that episodic memory functionally relies on very rapid reactivation of sensory information that was present during encoding, a process termed “ecphory.”¹

What they don’t say is that this is too fast for brain-activated memory. Transmission within the nervous system across synapses (the gaps between brain cells) is ten times slower than transmission through nerve fibers; typically about 2 milliseconds to cross the gap. The 100-millisecond delay they were finding would allow connection through only 50 – 100 brain cells at most. Hardly enough to record the smell, sound, colors, emotion, words, lighting, body posture and all the other dozens of memory modalities for even a single instant of memory!

They need a new theory! They just virtually “proved” that the brain only processes memories, it does not handle or record them!

Episodic memory, by the way, means recalling experiences and events, as opposed to what we call learned memory (repetition and training of the mind).

More Information on Brain Science

The average human brain has about 21- 26 billion neurons (or nerve cells) in the cerebral cortex, not 100 billion as if often stated.²

Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections (1 billion US), and equivalent by some estimates to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor. Estimates of the human mind’s memory capacity vary wildly from 1 to 1,000 terabytes (for comparison, the 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represents about 10 terabytes of data).

Functionally related neurons connect to each other to form neural networks (also known as neural nets or assemblies). The connections between neurons are not static, they change over time. The more signals sent between two neurons, the stronger the connection grows (technically, the amplitude of the receiver neuron’s response increases), and so, with each new experience and each remembered event or fact, the brain slightly re-wires its physical structure.

We call that “brain plasticity”. But it’s about scale and size, NOT speed.

Allometry

This word just means brain measurements or the brain “numbers” (metrics). For example, the estimated 21 – 26 billion neurons in the human cortex just quoted is an allometric figure. Not so scary!

There are some amazing revelations using brain allometry that science just ignores.

For example the human brain (83 billion neurons, including cortex, cerebellum, brain stem etc.) is smaller than the generic “primate brain” (93 billion cells total), meaning the brain scaled for size and content, as opposed to an absolute count. That’s bad. But even worse, the generic rodent brain contains 12 billion cells. That means we have proportionately just over 6 times the brain size and power that rodents have. Does that make sense to you? Could a rat have around 1/6^th of the brain power of Einstein, Shakespeare or Beethoven?

What is emerging with the new science of brain allometrics is that the human brain, considering its size, is far from being as supercharged with cells and as powerful as science has always supposed.

To conclude that the human brain is a linearly scaled-up primate brain, with just the expected number of neurons, or slightly less, for a primate brain of its size, basically says that it is unremarkable in its capabilities.

However, as studies on the cognitive abilities of non-human primates and other large-brained animals (like cetaceans) progress, it becomes increasingly likely that humans do not have truly unique cognitive abilities, and hence must differ from these animals not qualitatively, but rather in the combination and extent of abilities such as theory of mind, imitation and social cognition.³

Put another way, the brain can’t really do the job that brain science has assigned to it. Our mental powers do not come from our brains, after all. It’s back to non-material Being. The brain is only a relay point or switchboard.

I agree with Suzana Herculano-Houzel at the Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, writing for the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, that: “Novel quantitative data on the cellular composition of the human brain and its comparison to other primate brains strongly indicate that we need to rethink our notions about the place that the human brain holds in nature and evolution, and rewrite some of the basic concepts that are taught in textbooks.”⁴

She is not going as far as to state that mind and Being are non-material. But she makes it plain, in a very long review article that a lot of brain theory simply doesn’t stand up. It’s just dogma and tradition, not real brain science.

Still, you will admit, numbers can be interesting at times!

References:

1. Gerd T. Waldhauser, Verena Braun, and Simon Hanslmayr. Episodic Memory Retrieval Functionally Relies on Very Rapid Reactivation of Sensory Information. The Journal of Neuroscience, 6 January 2016, 36(1): 251-260; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2101-15.2016

2. Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009). The human brain in numbers: A linearly scaled-up primate brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Front. Hum. Neurosci., 3(00031).

3. PLoS Biol. 5:e139. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050139

4. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 09 November 2009

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Bacterial Recount Update: Repost from Science News

Turns out our body's cells are not outnumbered by the bacteria that live in here with us. Read on...

Reprint:

Body’s bacteria don’t outnumber human cells so much after all

New calculations suggest roughly equal populations, not 10-to-1 ratio

EVEN ODDS In the human body, bacteria (such as Enterococcus bacteria, shown) were once thought to outnumber human cells by 10-to-1. New calculations show roughly equal numbers of each.

CULTURA RM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A “standard man” weighing 70 kilograms has roughly the same number of bacteria and human cells in his body, researchers report online January 6 at bioRxiv.org. This average guy would be composed of about 40 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, calculate researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That’s a ratio of 1.3 bacteria to every one human cell.
That estimate could be off by as much as 25 percent, with the average number of bacteria ranging from 30 trillion to 50 trillion. Among individual people, the bacterial count could vary as much as 52 percent, say Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo. With a fudge factor of 10 trillion to 20 trillion bacteria, the number of microbes may pretty well match the number of human cells in the body, which also varies somewhat. “Indeed, the numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria,” the researchers write.
Scientists who study the microbiome, the collection of microorganisms that live in and on the human body, have peppered research papers with an estimate that bacteria outnumber human cells 10-to-1 or even 100-to-1. In recent years, those estimates have come into question, with the American Academy of Microbiology suggesting in 2013 that the real figure is probably closer to three bacterial cells for each human cell.
Story continues after graphic

Judah Rosner, a molecular biologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., called the 10-to-1 ratio a “fake fact” in a 2014 issue of Microbe. It probably wormed its way into scientific literature because it sounds good, Rosner says. “Everybody likes a nice, round number. And it had such impact. It was good PR.” But Rosner and others wondered where the number had come from in the first place.
Sender and Milo at the Weizmann Institute and Fuchs now at the Hospital for Sick Children traced the figure to a single, back-of-the-envelope calculation in a 1972 paper. The researchers combed scientific literature to come up with their own estimates of bacterial and human cell numbers.
Plenty of cocktail-party fodder is buried in the results. For instance, the team finds that red blood cells are the most numerous cells in the body, accounting for 84 percent of cells in the body by number. By weight, muscle and fat are the heavy hitters, making up 75 percent of cell mass. But those cells tend to be big and represent only about 0.1 percent of the human body cell number. As expected, most of the bacteria in the body — about 39 trillion — live in the colon.
Women tend to have smaller blood volume than men, so their bacteria-to-human cell ratio may be about 30 percent higher than that of men, the researchers calculate. Growing children probably fall within the range of bacteria-to-human cell ratios of adult men. Obesity doesn’t change the ratio much, the team calculates.
These estimates haven’t been checked by other scientists yet, but microbiome researchers say they appreciate the effort to examine the ratio. “Anytime people can add more precision it’s good,” says microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine. The researchers didn’t do any experiments, and Blaser says others should begin measuring bacterial and human cell numbers to get an even more accurate number.
Other researchers point out that the new paper’s calculations considered only bacteria, while viruses, fungi, archaea and other microbes are also part of the human microbiome. Viruses vastly outnumber bacteria (SN: 1/11/14, p.18) and could skew the microbe-to-human cell ratio upwards, says Julie Segre, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., and a leader of the human skin microbiome project.
Most microbiome research has focused on how relative amounts of bacteria change between health and disease, but scientists don’t yet know whether the absolute amount of bacteria is also important, says microbiologist Ran Blekhman at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The reduced ratio in no way diminishes the effect bacteria have on human health, commenters toldScience News. Most said it doesn’t matter what the real number is, just that it’s right. Besides, “one-to-one is pretty impressive,” Rosner says. “There’s as much of them as there is of us.”

R. Sender, S. Fuchs and R. Milo. Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body. BioRxiv.org. Posted online January 6, 2016.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

A Simple Explanation of Extracellular Vesicles--Reprint

A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything suggests that all entities are "units of consciousness" capable of knowledge and communication. Science is beginning to discover this. Here's a reprint of an article concerning communication by "extracellular vesicles (EVs)".

REPRINT By Dr. Mercola (redirect to Mercola Website's original article)

One way your cells communicate with each other is through the release of tiny “bubbles,” known as extracellular vesicles (EVs). These tiny cells are about the size of bacteria and viruses, and they’re only visible using an electron microscope.

For many years researchers believed EVs were carrying biological debris made up of various proteins and genetic material. It’s now known EVs have a much more important role, acting as ferries to send important messages to other cells.

Now a new study using roundworms has added more insights into how these cellular messengers work.

Extracellular Vesicles May Play a Significant Role in Human Health and Disease

Researchers from Rutgers University revealed 335 genes in roundworms (C. elegans) that supply information about the biology of EVs. About 10 percent of those genes were related to the formation, release, and, possibly, function of EVs.1

EVs are found in blood, urine, cerebrospinal fluid, and more, but it’s unknown where they originate, how they’re made, or how their “cargo of molecules” is released.2 In other words, EVs remain much of a mystery.

The EVs may be good or bad. For instance, they may play a role in sending messages between cells that promote tumor growth. The study also revealed more information about how EVs are produced and why they carry certain “cargo.”

For instance, EVs are known to carry proteins responsible for polycystic kidney disease, the most commonly inherited disease in humans, but no one knows why.3 Maureen Barr, lead author and a professor in the Department of Genetics in Rutgers' School of Arts and Sciences, told Science Daily:4

"These EVs are exciting but scary because we don't know what the mechanisms are that decide what is packaged inside them … It's like getting a letter in the mail and you don't know whether it's a letter saying that you won the lottery or a letter containing anthrax."

C. elegans is the perfect vehicle for learning more about EVs because the worms have similar genes to humans. Such research could help uncover EVs’ significance for human health and disease. Barr continued 5

"When we know exactly how they work, scientists will be able to use EVs for our advantage … This means that pathological EVs that cause disease could be blocked and therapeutic EVs that can help heal can be designed to carry beneficial cargo."

Your Body Is Constantly Communicating

EVs are only one way your cells receive important information. The microorganisms in your gut also play a role. For instance, your gut’s microorganisms trigger the production of cytokines. Cytokines are involved in regulating your immune system’s response to inflammation and infection.

Much like hormones, cytokines are signaling molecules that aid cell-to-cell communication, telling your cells where to go when your inflammatory response is initiated.

There are signals between your gut and your brain, most of which travel along your vagus nerve.6 Vagus is Latin for “wandering,” aptly named as this long nerve travels from your skull down through your chest and abdomen, branching to multiple organs.

Cytokine messengers produced in your gut cruise up to your brain along the “vagus nerve highway.” Once in your brain, the cytokines tell your microglia (the immune cells in your brain) to perform certain functions, such as producing neurochemicals.

Some of these have negative effects on your mitochondria, which can impact energy production and apoptosis (cell death), as well as adversely impact the very sensitive feedback system that controls your stress hormones, including cortisol.

So, this inflammatory response that started in your gut travels to your brain, which then builds on it, and sends signals to the rest of your body in a complex feedback loop. Signals from your gut microorganisms travel elsewhere in your body to, including to your skin.

Then there are your hormones, or your body’s chemical messengers, which exert their effects throughout your body, helping to coordinate biological processes like metabolism and fertility. As reported by Frontline:7

“It is thanks to these chemicals that distant parts of the body communicate with one another during elaborate, and important, events. In response to a signal from the brain, hormones are secreted directly into the blood by the glands that produce and store them.”

Bacteria Have a Sophisticated Method of Communication

Bacteria (both good and bad) have a very sophisticated way of communicating with each other, and once they receive the signal that their numbers are sufficient to carry out their genetic function, they launch into action as a synchronized unit.

Researchers have discovered that bacteria communicate with each other using a chemical language called "quorum sensing." Every type of bacteria make and secrete small molecules. When a bacterium is alone, these molecules simply float away.

But, when there's a large enough group of bacteria, these secreted molecules increase in proportion to the number of bacteria emitting them. When the molecules reach a certain amount, the bacteria can tell how many neighbors it has, and suddenly all the bacteria begin to act as a synchronized group.

Bacteria do not only communicate in this way between their own species; they're all "multi-lingual" and can determine the presence and strength of other bacterial colonies.

Essentially, they can count how many of its own kind there are compared to the amount of another species. They then use that information to decide what tasks to carry out, depending on who's in a minority and who's in the majority of any given population of bacteria.

Even Plants Communicate

Plants communicate with other plants — even with plants of other species — through a complex underground network that includes:

1. The plants' rhizosphere (root ball)

2. Aerial emissions (volatile gasses emitted by the plants)

3. Mycelial networks in the soil

These three systems work together forming a "plant internet" of sorts where information about each plant's status is constantly exchanged. One of the organisms responsible for this remarkable biochemical highway is a type of fungus called mycorrhizae. The name mycorrhiza literally means fungus root.8

These fungi form a symbiotic relationship with the plant, colonizing the roots and sending extremely fine filaments far out into the soil that act as root extensions.

Not only do these networks sound the alarm about invaders, but the filaments are more effective in nutrient and water absorption than the plant roots themselves — mycorrhizae increase the nutrient absorption of the plant 100 to 1,000 times.9

In one thimbleful of healthy soil, you can find several miles of fungal filaments, all releasing powerful enzymes that help dissolve tightly bound soil nutrients, such as organic nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron.

Previous research has shown that when a plant becomes infested with a pest like aphids for example, it warns surrounding plants of the attack via this network of mycorrhizal fungi.10

This "heads up" gives the other plants time to mount their chemical defenses in order to repel the aphids. Mycorrhizae fungi can even connect plants of different species, perhaps allowing interspecies communication.

Powerful Demonstration of Interspecies Communication

Entomologist Aaron Pomerantz was in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest when he discovered what’s described as a “weird relationship between butterflies, ants, and a parasitic plant.11 The plant appeared as yellow growths coating the side of a tree.

A caterpillar was eating the yellow buds, and the caterpillars were being “tended to” by ants, possibly as a form of protection. The ants, in turn, were stroking the caterpillars, which would release a bead of liquid nourishment that the ants consumed.

Butterflies were plentiful near the buds, too, and it turns out the caterpillars were the butterflies’ larval form. The butterflies, known as the Terenthina terentia species, even had yellow spots on their wings, presumably to blend in with the yellow parasitic plant.

Pomerantz found “nothing like this had ever been documented before,” but it’s a powerful demonstration of not only the symbiotic relationship between these species but also of interspecies communication.

Even though it’s unclear how the species are communicating – how do the ants know the caterpillars will provide food in exchange for protection, for instance? – it’s clear that they most certainly are.12 It’s another fascinating mystery of nature, and also shows that, just like within your body, complex communication is often occurring whether you’re aware of it or not.

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