Biologists discover bacteria behave like neurons in the brain--UCSD News Release

This hybrid image depicts a human brain on the left and an aggregation of bacteria on the right--as the Simple Explanation predicted, the similarity is more than visual. (Gürol Süel)

PUBLIC RELEASE: 21-OCT-2015

Biologists discover bacteria communicate like neurons in the brain

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that bacteria--often viewed as lowly, solitary creatures--are actually quite sophisticated in their social interactions and communicate with one another through similar electrical signaling mechanisms as neurons in the human brain.

In a study published in this week's advance online publication of Nature, the scientists detail the manner by which bacteria living in communities communicate with one another electrically through proteins called "ion channels."

"Our discovery not only changes the way we think about bacteria, but also how we think about our brain," said Gürol Süel, an associate professor of molecular biology at UC San Diego who headed the research project. "All of our senses, behavior and intelligence emerge from electrical communications among neurons in the brain mediated by ion channels. Now we find that bacteria use similar ion channels to communicate and resolve metabolic stress. Our discovery suggests that neurological disorders that are triggered by metabolic stress may have ancient bacterial origins, and could thus provide a new perspective on how to treat such conditions."

"Much of our understanding of electrical signaling in our brains is based on structural studies of bacterial ion channels" said Süel. But how bacteria use those ion channels remained a mystery until Süel and his colleagues embarked on an effort to examine long-range communication within biofilms--organized communities containing millions of densely packed bacterial cells. These communities of bacteria can form thin structures on surfaces--such as the tartar that develops on teeth--that are highly resistant to chemicals and antibiotics.

The scientists' interest in studying long-range signals grew out of a previous study, published in July in Nature, which found that biofilms are able to resolve social conflicts within their community of bacterial cells just like human societies.

When a biofilm composed of hundreds of thousands of Bacillus subtilis bacterial cells grows to a certain size, the researchers discovered, the protective outer edge of cells, with unrestricted access to nutrients, periodically stopped growing to allow nutrients--specifically glutamate, to flow to the sheltered center of the biofilm. In this way, the protected bacteria in the colony center were kept alive and could survive attacks by chemicals and antibiotics.

Realizing that oscillations in biofilm growth required long-range coordination between bacteria at the periphery and interior of the biofilm, together with the fact that bacteria were competing for glutamate, an electrically charged molecule, prompted the researchers to speculate that the metabolic coordination among distant cells within biofilms might involve a form of electrochemical communication. The scientists noted that glutamate is also known to drive about half of all human brain activity.

So they designed an experiment to test their hypothesis. The object was to carefully measure changes in bacterial cell membrane potential during metabolic oscillations.

The researchers observed oscillations in membrane potential that matched the oscillations in biofilm growth and found that ion channels were responsible for these changes in membrane potential. Further experiments revealed that oscillations conducted long-range electrical signals within the biofilms through spatially propagating waves of potassium, a charged ion. As these waves of charged ions propagate through the biofilm, they coordinated the metabolic activity of bacteria in the inner and outer regions of the biofilm. When the ion channel that allows potassium to flow in and out of cells was deleted from the bacteria, the biofilm was no longer able to conduct these electrical signals.

"Just like the neurons in our brain, we found that bacteria use ion channels to communicate with each other through electrical signals," said Süel. "In this way, the community of bacteria within biofilms appears to function much like a 'microbial brain'."

Süel added that the specific mechanism by which the bacteria communicate with one another is surprisingly similar to a process in the human brain known as "cortical spreading depression," which is thought to be involved in migraines and seizures.

"What's interesting is that both migraines and the electrical signaling in bacteria we discovered are triggered by metabolic stress," he said. "This suggests that many drugs originally developed for epilepsy and migraines may also be effective in attacking bacterial biofilms, which have become a growing health problem around the world because of their resistance to antibiotics."

###

Besides Süel, other researchers involved in the study were Arthur Prindle, Jintao Liu and San Ly of UC San Diego, Munehiro Asally of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo of the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

The study was funded by grants from the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01 GM088428, P50 GM085764), San Diego Center for Systems Biology and the National Science Foundation (MCB-1450867).

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This study proves a central tenent of the Simple Explanation philosophy--that all creatures are organized in the same fashion, no matter their size, complexity, or physical structure. The organizational systems are hierarchically arranged aggregates of greater and greater complexity, each level carrying a larger piece of the puzzle than the level before. 

I'll come back to this in a couple of days with an article concerning the impact the bacterial "brain" has on larger organisms.

A Beautiful Piece of Toroidal Literature -- ‘The last man’ (Le dernier homme, 1957)

One of the blog's regular readers sent me this beautiful snippet of literature the other day. I have not read the entire book, but I hope you will recognize the Simple Explanation's toroidal flow and Units of Consciousness at work in the following:

“Against you, motionless thought, everything that is reflected in us of everyone comes to assume form, shine, and then disappear. In this way we have the most people, in this way everyone is reflected in each of us by an infinite glimmering that projects us into a radiant intimacy from which each returns to himself, illuminated by being no more than a reflection of everyone else. And the thought that each of us is only the reflection of the universal reflection, this answer to our lightness, makes us drunk with that lightness, makes us ever lighter, lighter than ourselves, in the infinitely glimmering sphere which, from its surface to its single spark, is our own eternal coming and going.”

Maurice Blanchot, ‘The last man’ (Le dernier homme, 1957), translated by Lydia Davis.

“Contre toi, pensée immobile, vient prendre figure, briller et disparaître tout ce qui se réfléchit en nous de tous. Ainsi avons-nous le plus grand monde, ainsi, en chacun de nous, tous se réfléchissent par un infini miroitement qui nous projette en une intimité rayonnante d'où chacun revient à lui-même, illuminé de n'être que le reflet de tous. Et la pensée que nous ne sommes, chacun, que le reflet de l'universel reflet, cette réponse à notre légèreté nous rend ivres de cette légèreté, nous fait toujours plus légers, plus légers que nous, dans l'infini de la sphère miroitante qui, de la surface à l'étincelle unique, est l'éternel va-et-vient de nous-mêmes”.

Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier homme, 1957

Close-minded Experts Get It Wrong

My brother, David, sent me this synopsis on how and why "experts" get it wrong so much of the time. It has to do with certainty in one's beliefs--experts are so certain they're right, they are prone to overlook results that do not uphold their hypotheses. Here's the report:

During a four-year study, a pool of amateur forecasters of future events beat experts with classified information, and the amateur "Super-forecasters" were more accurate than the team of experts by 30%.

Conclusions from research published in Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” included the following:

• The most careful, curious, open-minded, persistent and self-critical—as measured by a battery of psychological tests—did the best.
• “What you think is much less important than how you think,” says Prof. Tetlock; superforecasters regard their views “as hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
• Most experts—like most people—“are too quick to make up their minds and too slow to change them,” he says. And experts are paid not just to be right, but to sound right: cocksure even when the evidence is sparse or ambiguous.

You can read more about this in the WSJ article "The Trick to Making Better Forecasts."   While the story focuses on monetary predictions, the approach to reasoning and decision making applies to our everyday lives.

				The Trick to Making Better Forecasts The Intelligent Investor: A new book suggests that amateurs might well be less-hapless forecasters than the experts—so long as they go about it the right way.
				View on www.wsj.com	Preview by Yahoo

Here at the Simple Explanation blog, we strive to look at scientific findings with a fresh eye. This is not ignorance on our part--it's the way forward to fresh discoveries.

Dad's 1939 Vacation Pith Helmet

In 1939, when my dad was 20 years old, he took a road trip with his family from Colorado to Tijuana and back, stopping at many sights along the way. As it says on the top of the helmet: "A grand trip through 11 states, 2 national parks, 1 national monument, 1 outside nation, 1 Pacific Island playground, and a movie studio."

Dad recorded his trip on a pith helmet he took along. The pith helmet serves as both a map and an autograph book. I imagine that everyone who signed this helmet has long since passed over to the great beyond. I am very happy to still possess that souvenir.

(You can click on any picture to see it bigger--please do!"

This part of the pith helmet map shows the trip winding through Yellowstone National Park, where he meets up with the Morgans. There's a cartoon of two stick figures = martini glass which reads: "Hi, Morg." "Hi George," (equals) "Hi Ball." That joke has always cracked me up.

Dad's trip began on August 7, 1939 and ended August 31, 1939. The drawings on the hat begin at the START point and wind all over the pith helmet until the END. A caption reads, "Length of trip 5081 miles. Approximately as far as from Home to New York City and back to Los Angeles."

"A week's stay in Los Angeles--Mausoleum, Catalina, Auto Races, Warner Brothers Movie Studio, Santa Monica Beach, Venice--Fun House, Tijuana"

Here's the Oregon coast, where he stopped at Reedsport--"more curves than between Durango and Mancos." In Northern California he visited the "Italian Swiss Colony and Winery," then stopped at the "World's Largest and Oldest Living Things--the Redwoods." There's a cartoon of a giant redwood tree with a tiny stick figure underneath it which reads, "Us. Small, like little white lice." A little farther on there's a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge and "Treasure Island--Isle of Sore Feet." 

The brim reads: "The Five Forgotten Footworn Followers of Fame and Fortune Who Forged Forward Furiously to Frisco and Back to the Foothills of Home."  There were five signatures, now faded by time, but you can still make out my father's name, "Bill Puett" and "Dill," dad's step-dad--Dillworth Halls. Frances, his mother, would have been on that brim, too.

There are more cartoons, more signatures, more little jokes, more sights described.  I'll post more of them if anyone's interested. Just let me know...

Wolflike Genes in Dogs

This nifty graphic first appeared in National Geographic magazine in 2012. Geneticists analyzed the DNA of 85 breeds of dogs and categorized them into four categories according to how wolf-like they are gentically. The graphic below displays the dogs in order of their genetic similarity to wolves, from the "wolflike" breeds at the top of the chart, through "herders," "hunters," and "mastifflike." The color red represents percentages of wolflike genes.

"WOLFLIKE

With roots in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, these breeds are genetically closest to wolves, suggesting they are the oldest domesticated breeds.

HERDERS

Familiar herding breeds such as the Shetland sheepdog are joined by breeds never known for herding: the greyhound, pug, and borzoi. This suggests those breeds either were used in the creation of classic herding dogs or descended from them.

HUNTERS

Most in this group were developed in recent centuries as hunting dogs. While the pharaoh hound and Ibizan hound are said to descend from dogs seen on ancient Egyptian tombs, their placement here suggests they are re-creations bred to resemble ancient breeds.

MASTIFFLIKE

The German shepherd’s appearance in this cluster, anchored by the mastiff, bulldog, and boxer, likely reflects its breeding as a military and police dog."

{from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/build-a-dog/dog-families-graphic} 

A Poem--When the Old Dog Dies

I wrote this poem a few months ago when my dog, Zoey, died. Her lifetime companion and littermate, Franny, died on Saturday. We are now without dogs or cats for the first time ever. My animal friends have always been my best friends and I look forward to seeing them again someday. 

Here is a poem I wrote when Zoey passed on, which I have now edited to include Franny's passing.

Zoey

 Franny

When the old dog dies

I will no longer have to step carefully over her sleeping form

As I rise from bed and feel my way to the toilet in the dark.

When the old dog dies

I can take the ratty old blanket from off the couch

where we sit for hours watching classic movies and eating popcorn.

When the old dog dies

No one will insist I go for walks twice every day

And no one will pull me out the door into rain, into snow, into blistering August heat.

When the old dog is gone

I can eat my meals in peace and quiet

And not have to share bites off the edges of my toast.

When the old dog dies

I can take the beach towels off the car seats and vacuum out all the fur and return the the van from a rolling dog house

Fit for human passengers again.

When the dog finally dies

I can put fancy cheeses in the refrigerator drawer that now houses two pounds of raw, four-meat canine blend from the butcher shop and and a variety of half-chewed bones.

When the dog is gone

I can go to the mall all afternoon and maybe even take in a movie

Without wondering how she is doing home alone.

When the old dog has gone

I won’t have to search for missing shoes

she has carried from the closet and stashed in odd piles about the house.

After the old dog dies

I can sleep until noon if I want to

And no one will jab me with a cold, wet nose over and over and over again until I give up and get out of bed.

After the old dog is gone

I can get dressed in peace

Without her barking and dancing in happy circles as if my life’s purpose was to take her out for a stroll or a ride in the car.

How much quieter, roomier, cleaner the house will seem without her constantly by my side.

Quantum Spookiness Demonstrated--Karma at a Distance

Back in May of 2011, the Simple Explanation blog posted an article called "Quantum Entanglement and Karma."  At that time, I described quantum entanglement and and suggested it as a reasonable mechanism for karma. 

From that 2011 article:

"Karma is the mechanism through which the consequences of behavior inform future potential. Karma is a force of influence that arises out of the decision-making history of every unit of consciousness in the universe. Each UC generates its own karma. We are all affected by one another’s karma. The more a unit of consciousness has in common with another UC, the more it is affected by the other’s karma. Our aggregate karma affects all of creation."

To this definition we can now add quantum entanglement:  Your actions affect not only you, they affect me to the extent we are "entangled." And, because of entanglement swapping, not only am I affected by you, but so is everyone else who is entangled with me, and everyone else entangled with them. And so on, and so on, and so on." A Simple Explanation of Quantum Entanglement and Karma" 

I am happy to report to you that the claim of action-at-a-distance was scientifically verified last week. There is now no scientific reason that Karma at a distance cannot operate in the same way. Read the article below to see how they proved it.

"This latest experiment involved physicists from the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain, who entangled pairs of electrons separated by a distance of 1.3 km. Led by Delft University of Technology researcher B. Hensen from the Netherlands, the team then measured one of the electrons while a group immediately observed whether its partner was affected.

This is a take on the classic 'Bell experiment' devised in the 1960s by Irish physicist John Bell to test whether there was a more sensible explanation for entanglement. According to the rational view of the world, after a certain distance, the correlation should cease to exist as the particles are too far away to communicate with each other. But according to quantum theory, there will be no distance limit.

Over the past 30 years or so the Bell experiment has been attempted many times, always showing that quantum theory is real. But in all those experiments there have been loopholes - usually the fact that most researchers entangle photons, which are hard to pin down and measure due to their super-fast nature, so as many as 80 percent are lost before being measured, making results inconclusive.

In an attempt to close that loophole, many physicists use entangled ions instead of photons. But this opens up another loophole, because these ions aren't kept far enough apart to rule out that they aren't somehow influencing each other by communicating information normally - in other words, at a rate less than the speed of light.

The new experiment managed to close both those loopholes by combining the benefits of photons with electrons, which are easier to measure. To do this, the team entangled the spin of two electrons with two different photons. Those two electrons were located in labs 1.3 km apart, while the photons were sent off to a third location and then separately entangled with each other.

"As soon as the photons are entangled, BINGO, so too are the two original electron spins, seated in vastly distant labs, reports science writer Zeeya Merali over at FQXi blogs. "The team carried out 245 trials of the experiment, comparing entangled electrons, and report that Bell’s bound is violated."

So that means that there really is some freaky quantum behaviour going on, and the results can't be blamed on some kind of loophole.

"Our experiment realises the first Bell test that simultaneously addresses both the detection loophole and the locality loophole," the authors write over at arXiv, where they've published the early results. They're now refining the experiment for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. 

"It’s a very nice and beautiful experiment, and one can only congratulate the group for that," Anton Zeilinger, the leader of a rival team at the University of Vienna in Austria, who wasn't involved in the research, told Jacob Aron over at New Scientist. "I expect they have improved the experiment, and by the time it is published they’ll have better data ... There is no doubt it will withstand scrutiny."  from an article entitled: Quantum spookiness has been confirmed by first loophole-free experiment.  It's official: reality is freaking weird. by FIONA MACDONALD 31 AUG 2015  Science Alert http://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-spookiness-has-been-confirmed-by-first-loophole-free-experiment

Simplicity Is Not Reductionism

Every once in a while, someone I'm talking with reacts poorly to the very notion that complex concepts should or could be simplified--as if this Simple Explanation blog contributes to "dumbing down" science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. "Your theory is nothing but pure fantasy and speculation," I hear them say.

Well, I've got news for them-- All axioms are fundamentally unprovable. This is true in science, in logic, and in math. Fundamental propositions are assumed to be true. All of these axioms are in fact intuitive. So the criticism that the Simple Explanation is intuitive is a false criticism, as the same can be said of all science, logic, and math. According to U.C. Berkeley's Understanding Science website: 

"All of science is based on a few fundamental assumptions that transcend any individual experiment or study."

Understanding Science goes on to explain that, while the fundamental propositions may be assumptions, they generate testable hypotheses that can verify the assumptions. The Simple Explanation is not unscientific--it verifies its hypotheses through observation and by mining other people's research findings, amply demonstrating its theoretical robustness.

I talked this over with my brother, Bill, the philosopher, and he felt it was very important to explain the difference between "simplicity" and "reductionism." So here goes.

Simplicity is not reductionism. 

Simplicity as I use the term involves stripping away layers of linguistic and cultural particulars to reveal underlying universal patterns. According to the Simple Explanation, once memes are lifted out of their familiar linguistic and cultural expressions, their universal applicability can be readily discerned.

Reductionism, on the other hand, narrows the focus of exploration by pursuing information from smaller and smaller objects, as in the way physicists look for ever smaller particles and wave forms to explain the composition of our universe. Hand in hand with this pursuit is the assumption that an object can be reduced to its tiniest components and that this will reveal its underlying nature.

I'm happy to see that according to wikipedia, Bill and I are not alone in our distrust of reductionism. Apparently reductionism doesn't go over so well with ecologists or systems theorists, because interactive systems can't be described by their smallest objects but must be described in terms of relationships and interactions. From the wiki article on reductionism: "Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.^[24]"

So, while conventional science believes itself to be thoroughly pursuing truth through reductionism, the Simple Explanation would say it is more like they are trying to describe the haystack by counting the number of its molecules. Yes, it is a measurable result, but meaningless.

Again, from wikipedia: "Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance's boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks and leptons, perhaps) would be even better. Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super~theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Here at the Simple Explanation, simplicity means "elegance"--the simplest theory that explains the most evidence. But unlike methodological reductionism, the Simple Explanation does not restrict truth to the tiny.The simplicity pursued by the Simple Explanation is of an entirely different kind--a true theory of everything looks for the underlying reality of our cosmos, irregardless of where it is to be found. 

A Simple, Animated, Gnostic Cosmology

Be sure to watch this full screen!

I've taken the Gnostic Cosmology schematic that I posted last week and animated it in PowerPoint. A bit technically crude, but it's a start.

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. The entire schema above is described step-by-step in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.

Gnostic Cosmology Artwork

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. 

A Simple Gnostic Cosmology by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.,

according to the Tripartite Tractate

Meanwhile, can you tell what is happening in the story above?