the geopolitics of social cohesion
https://www.noemamag.com/the-geopolitics-of-social-cohesion/
One unique quality of Noema is that we are not a publication that just puts content out there for passive consumption. We are an active, continuing conversation on the frontier issues of the day that seeks to link the correspondence of ideas and connect the dots.
In an interview this week on his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt worries that unfettered social media in liberal societies is harming childhood while fostering a fatal fragmentation of society, even putting the West at a disadvantage in competition with China’s authoritarian regime that has no qualms in trying to protect its kids and culture with far stricter controls. His observations echo the concerns also raised in Noema by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
For all these thinkers, liberal societies are being tested as never before by a social media ecosystem that pushes the cohesion of society to its outer limits.
Haidt’s primary concern is the damage smartphone-driven social media is doing to children, substituting virtual in-experience for physical interplay with unlike-minded others, depriving them of the skills to cope in a diverse society, stealing their attention and inducing a level of anxiety that has led to an alarming surge of mental illness, including depression, self-harm and suicide among teens.
His practical remedies include no smartphones before high school; no social media before 16; phone-free schools and allowing kids more independence in order to restore a “play-based” childhood.
Are Smartphones Making American Kids Dumber?
Haidt laments dropping test scores in American schools as the TikTok obsession distracts kids from the concentration required for learning. And he worries about the geopolitical implications as China takes the challenge of social media far more seriously by enforcing age and time limits on the use of and access to smartphones.
“China is engaged in a battle with the United States for cultural and economic supremacy. Since our young people are giving away all of their available attention,” he broods, “there’s a good chance that they will be less creative and less productive. They don’t have any spare attention to actually do anything. I imagine that makes the Chinese government happy.”
He continues: “The worst single product for American children is TikTok. It sucks up more of their time, energy and attention than any other product. And it harms them. It doesn’t do anything good for them. TikTok has more influence over our kids than any other organization on the planet. So, there are many reasons to think that that is a danger not only to our kids, but to our country. It seems the Chinese are doing the right thing by using their authoritarian system to reduce the damage to their own children.”
Of course, Haidt hastens to point out, “Authoritarian solutions are not right for us, but we can do similar things through democratic solutions, through community and civil society.” He harkens back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations of America where ordinary citizens don’t wait for the state or the king to act, but take matters into their own hands. “I’m hopeful that my book presents norms that we adopt ourselves, even if we never get any help from Congress or lawmakers. Doing it ourselves … is a very American solution to what I think is one of the largest problems facing America today.”
In his take on the damage social media does to young people, Žižek looks at South Korea as a case in point. He cites another philosopher, Franco Berardi, who regards South Korea as “arguably the country of free choice — not in the political sense, but in the sense of daily life, especially among the younger depoliticized generation … lonely monads walk in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow. … South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the [developed] world. Suicide is the most common cause of death for those under 40 in South Korea.”
For Žižek, it is no surprise that, worried about contagion, the authorities in next-door China are fighting back under President Xi Jinping’s project of rejuvenating traditional values associated with the continuous history of Chinese civilization stretching back millennia.
Žižek advises that we “closely follow the writings of Wang Huning, a current member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee and the director of Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization. Wang is correct in emphasizing the key role of culture, of the domain of symbolic fictions.”
After all, he continues:
Fictions are not outside reality, they are materialized in our social interactions, in our institutions and customs — as we can see in today’s mess, if we destroy fictions on which our social interactions are based, our social reality itself begins to fall apart.
Read Noema in print.
Wang sees his task as imposing a new common ethical substance, and we should not dismiss this as an excuse to impose the full control of the Communist Party over social life. He is replying to a real problem.
Žižek notes that, on a visit to the U.S. three decades ago, Wang perceived even then what he saw as “social disintegration, lack of solidarity and shared values, nihilist consumerism and individualism. Wang’s fear was that the same disease may spread to China, which is now happening at the popular level of mass culture. Xi’s reforms meant to bolster ‘spiritual civilization’ are a desperate attempt to put a stop to this trend.”
Though “the establishment of stable values that hold a society together” may be a laudable objective, says Žižek, the ongoing campaign to bolster spiritual civilization “is enforced in the form of mobilization which is experienced as a kind of emergency state imposed by the governing apparatus. Although the goal is the opposite of the Cultural Revolution, there are similarities with it in the way the campaign is done. The danger is that such tensions can produce cynical disbelief in the population.”
Social Media And The Loss of Authority
One of the reasons that we have such polarized societies in the West is that the public square has virtually disappeared. Until social media turbocharged fragmentation, there was a common space where competing ideas could be contested and settled in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.
But, as Han has observed, the peer-to-peer connectivity of social media “redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.” Without a trusted platform for common discourse, democracy can’t function.
Haidt agrees with Han. “Massive changes in information flows and the way we connect people change the fundamental ground within which our democratic institutions are operating. And it’s quite possible that we are now so far outside the operating range of these institutions that they will fail,” he warns. The corrosion of trusted institutions by the proliferation of digital tribes chipping away at the authority once vested in them comes at a steep cost.
Haidt is also on the same page as Žižek:
When I wrote ‘The Righteous Mind,’ I was on the left then and really tried to understand conservatives. Reading conservative writings, especially Edmund Burke and Thomas Sowell, was really clarifying on the idea that we need institutions. We need religion, we need gods, even if it is not true. We need moral order and constraint. … Without them [authority structures], we have chaos.
Haidt notes that, even when “truth-seeking mechanisms, including the courts” determined the last U.S. presidential election was not stolen, “there’s no real way to spread that around to the large portion of society that believes that it was.”
The displacement of a public square by the viral spectacle of social media hits at the heart of the sober deliberative quality that protects democracy from the pure wash of public passions:
There’s no more public square. … Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.
It all becomes performative and comes at a superfast pace. Just as television changed the way we are and made us into passive consumers, the central act in social media is posting, judging, criticizing and joining mobs. Donald Trump is the quintessential person who thrives in that environment. If not for Twitter, Trump never could have been president. So, when our politics moved into the Roman Colosseum, I think the Founding Fathers would have said, ‘Let’s just give up. There’s no way we can build a democracy in this environment.’
As Haidt sees it, AI will only compound matters because “With AI coming in, the problem of the loss of authority is going to be magnified tenfold or even a hundredfold when anyone can create a video of anyone saying anything in that person’s voice. It’s going to be almost impossible to know what’s true. We’re in for a wild ride if we’re going to try to run a democratic republic with no real authority. My fear is that we will simply become ungovernable. I hope not, I hope we find a way to adapt to living in our world after the fall of the tower of Babel, the fall of common understandings and common language.”
How will it all turn out as history unfolds? Are authoritarian societies that limit liberal freedoms in order to maintain authority and solidarity any more sustainable than liberal societies so lacking in constraints that the ties which bind can no longer hold?
The answer depends on whether the one can lighten up and the other can tighten up to achieve the right balance between liberty and social cohesion. What is clear is that how nations hang together internally — or not — will be a significant factor in the geopolitical competition ahead.
rumi - one of the world's most famous writers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNw9x53Ybos
rumi speaking on his mentor shams after he disappeared:
"he bathed us like a candle in his light; in thin air vanished, left us!"
seems like we all need a good satoshi.
The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/05/on-wanting-to-change-adam-phillips/
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.”
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change,”
from the article:
The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation: Adam Phillips on Our Ambivalent Desire for Change
When answering the Orion questionnaire, a question stopped me up short by contracting an incomprehensible expanse of complexity into a binary:
Are you the same person you were as a child?
It is fundamentally a question about change — its possibility and its paradoxes, our yearning for it and our ambivalence toward it. Here I am, living on a different landmass from the one I was born on, in a body composed of cells not one of which existed in its present form at my birth, but my sources of joy and suffering feel largely unchanged since I was a child. What, then, is change — and who is it doing the changing?
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change,” the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis wrote in his 1973 field guide to how people change. But when we wish to recreate ourselves, to change for the better, how do we know what to want, what is truly and dependably better? “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her wonderful Field Guide to Getting Lost, shining a sidewise gleam on our staggering blind spot about transformation — we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found. (Such changes tend to happen especially in midlife, when the accumulation of familiar suffering collides with our diminishing store of time to press us against the blade of urgency.)
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips takes up these restive questions with his characteristic rigor and sensitivity in On Wanting to Change (public library) — an insightful investigation of the paradoxes and possibilities of change, at the heart of which is our fundamental confusion about knowing what we really want, and what to want. He writes:
Wanting to change is as much about our wanting, and how we describe it, as it is about the changes we want. Getting better means working out what we want to get better at.
When we want to think of our lives as progress myths, in which we get better and better at realizing our so-called potential; or conversely as myths of degeneration — as about decay, mourning and loss (ageing as the loss of youth, and so on) — we are also plotting our lives. Giving them a known and knowable shape and purpose; providing ourselves with guidelines, if not blueprints, of what we can be and become. It is not that our lives are determined by our descriptions of them; but our descriptions do have an effect, however enigmatic or indiscernible it might be. And there is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.
Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion. With an eye to the various divides that sunder our lives — nature and culture, appearance and reality, the private and the public, the conscious and the unconscious — Phillips considers this essential fulcrum of change:
The so-called self is what we have come to call, in William James’s phrase, “a divided self”; and after James and Winnicott, a true and false self, or a self in language, in fantasy, but perhaps, or really, no self at all. A self and its absence co-existing, in its most modern form and formulation. A self always, at least, having to manage conflicting and competing versions of itself; a self always having to get its representations of itself right, even while knowing, in the modern way, that they are only representations, pictures and descriptions of something that may only exist in its pictures and descriptions. A self riddled with conflict, having to straddle the contradictions; or, at its most minimal, do something with or about them.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Phillips observes, the need for resolving and reconciling these inner contradictions has culminated in the notion of conversion, which he defines as “the exchange that demands change, and claims to know the change that is needed,” often “prompted by something unbearable.” But the two most formative conversions in that tradition, Paul and Augustine, “simply expose the conflicts they were meant to resolve and clarify.” (“The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her incisive Augustine-lensed meditation on love and loss, and nowhere is our happiness more beset by fear than in our fear of change. “It’s frightening to step out of oneself, but everything new is frightening,” Clarice Lispector wrote in her novel The Hour of the Star, and what is change if not our supreme way of stepping out of ourselves.) Phillips writes:
This tells us something revealing, so to speak, about our modern scepticism about personal change at its most dramatic and significant. This profound modern ambivalence about conversion experiences — mostly but not always from the non-religious — leads to many questions not only about people’s relationship to God, but about their relationship to change, to transformation itself; questions about how it occurs, and what it might be for (what it might be in the service of).
At the center of these ambivalences, of course, is the problem of free will and the fact that myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.
Phillips observes:
Change as an object of desire is a question of knowledge, of in some sense knowing what we want to be, or to become, or knowing that we don’t know what we want but that we want something.
A great deal of change takes place in relationships. “What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?” Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt. With an eye to Donald Winnicott’s pioneering work in developmental psychology, which illuminated how the mother-child relationship lays the foundation of future relationships, Phillips writes:
People are only ever converted to something they believe they can depend on… For Winnicott… the developmental question for everyone is: how can I depend on someone whose reliability can never be guaranteed? It is a straight line from this to the idea of faith; and the equation between believing in and depending on… Questions like this might help us to clarify the differences between conversion, addiction, entrapment and ownership; and whatever the alternatives could be in human relations. Conversion, addiction, entrapment and ownership, we should note, are all forms of consistency; and if and when consistency is equated with reliability, or dependability, or trust, these will be alluring, if malign, options. Winnicott proposes a capacity for surprise as an alternative to the need to be believed; an openness to surprise, a desire for it being integral, in his view, to a realistic and enlivening dependence on anything or anyone.
That capacity for surprise is another way of saying we must trust the uncertainty inherent in change if we are to reap the rewards of true transformation, undergo an inner conversion — one of “those momentous changes of belief that are changes of life.” And the refusal to ossify, the wish to change one’s life, shimmers with the deepest desire to live it. Virginia Woolf knew this: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
Complement On Wanting to Change with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on the art of beginnings — that supreme springboard of change — then revisit Phillips on knowing what you want and the courage to change your mind.
what's your getting ready for the day track?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnhuZ_p-dbQ
i used to listen to this track every day on my way to work, in the before days. it became a form of mediation for me. over the course of two years i found myself adding a little more and more to the experience. first, little gratitudes. then a gratitude for every little thing. then came the affirmations and visualization. i was able to see a change in how i handled my day. good or bad, easy or tough, i was grounded.
i don't think this is any different than gym tracks or hype tracks or any track you listen to for a certain purpose. it's all mental manipulation. i would love to hear yours and the story behind it if you have one.
The Complex Social Lives of Viruses
https://www.wired.com/story/the-complex-social-lives-of-viruses/
what can we learn from viruses? how can we use it for bitcoin?
the article...
Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes, or do much of anything. Researchers assumed that each virus was a solitary particle drifting alone through the world, able to replicate only if it happened to bump into the right cell that could take it in.
This simplicity was what attracted many scientists to viruses in the first place, said Marco Vignuzzi, a virologist at the Singapore Agency for Science, Research and Technology Infectious Diseases Labs. “We were trying to be reductionist.”
That reductionism paid off. Studies on viruses were crucial to the birth of modern biology. Lacking the complexity of cells, they revealed fundamental rules about how genes work. But viral reductionism came at a cost, Vignuzzi said: By assuming viruses are simple, you blind yourself to the possibility that they might be complicated in ways you don’t know about yet.
For example, if you think of viruses as isolated packages of genes, it would be absurd to imagine them having a social life. But Vignuzzi and a new school of like-minded virologists don’t think it’s absurd at all. In recent decades, they have discovered some strange features of viruses that don’t make sense if viruses are lonely particles. They instead are uncovering a marvelously complex social world of viruses. These sociovirologists, as the researchers sometimes call themselves, believe that viruses make sense only as members of a community.
Granted, the social lives of viruses aren’t quite like those of other species. Viruses don’t post selfies to social media, volunteer at food banks, or commit identity theft like humans do. They don’t fight with allies to dominate a troop like baboons; they don’t collect nectar to feed their queen like honeybees; they don’t even congeal into slimy mats for their common defense like some bacteria do. Nevertheless, sociovirologists believe that viruses do cheat, cooperate, and interact in other ways with their fellow viruses.
The field of sociovirology is still young and small. The first conference dedicated to the social life of viruses took place in 2022, and the second will take place this June. A grand total of 50 people will be in attendance. Still, sociovirologists argue that the implications of their new field could be profound. Diseases like influenza don’t make sense if we think of viruses in isolation from one another. And if we can decipher the social life of viruses, we might be able to exploit it to fight back against the diseases some of them create.
Under Our Noses
Some of the most important evidence for the social life of viruses has been sitting in plain view for nearly a century. After the discovery of the influenza virus in the early 1930s, scientists figured out how to grow stocks of the virus by injecting it into a chicken egg and letting it multiply inside. The researchers could then use the new viruses to infect lab animals for research or inject them into new eggs to keep growing new viruses.
In the late 1940s, the Danish virologist Preben von Magnus was growing viruses when he noticed something odd. Many of the viruses produced in one egg could not replicate when he injected them into another. By the third cycle of transmission, only one in 10,000 viruses could still replicate. But in the cycles that followed, the defective viruses became rarer and the replicating ones bounced back. Von Magnus suspected that the viruses that couldn’t replicate had not finished developing, and so he called them “incomplete.”
In later years, virologists named the boom and bust of incomplete viruses “the von Magnus effect.” To them, it was important—but only as a problem to solve. Since no one had seen incomplete viruses outside of a lab culture, virologists figured they were artificial and came up with ways to get rid of them.
“You have to eliminate these from your lab stocks because you don’t want them to interfere with your experiments,” said Sam Díaz-Muñoz, a virologist at the University of California, Davis, recalling the common view within the field. “Because this is not ‘natural.’”
Researchers in the 1960s observed that incomplete viral genomes were shorter than those of typical viruses. That finding strengthened the view of many virologists that incomplete viruses were defective oddities, lacking the genes needed to replicate. But in the 2010s, inexpensive, powerful gene-sequencing technology made it clear that incomplete viruses were actually abundant inside our own bodies.
In one study, published in 2013, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh swabbed the noses and mouths of people sick with the flu. They pulled out the genetic material from influenza viruses in the samples and discovered that some of the viruses were missing genes. These stunted viruses came into existence when infected cells miscopied the genome of a functional virus, accidentally skipping stretches of genes.
Other studies confirmed this discovery. They also revealed other ways that incomplete viruses can form. Some kinds of viruses carry garbled genomes, for example. In these cases, an infected cell started copying a viral genome only to reverse partway through and then copy the genome backward to its starting point. Other incomplete viruses form when mutations disrupt the sequence of a gene so that it can no longer make a functional protein.
These studies demolished the old assumption that von Magnus’ incomplete viruses were only an artifact of lab experiments. “They’re a natural part of virus biology,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
Discovering incomplete viruses in our own bodies has inspired a new surge of scientific interest in them. Influenza is not unique: Many viruses come in incomplete forms. They make up the majority of viruses found in people sick with infections such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and measles.
Scientists have also come up with new names for von Magnus’ incomplete viruses. Some call them “defective interfering particles.” Others call them “nonstandard viral genomes.”
Díaz-Muñoz and colleagues have another name for them: cheaters.
A Viral Grift
Incomplete viruses can typically get into cells, but once inside, they cannot replicate on their own. They lack some of the genes essential for hijacking their host’s protein-making machinery, such as the one for a gene-copying enzyme known as a polymerase. In order to replicate, they have to cheat. They have to take advantage of their fellow virus.
Fortunately for the cheaters, cells are often infected by more than one viral genome. If a functional virus shows up in a cheater’s cell, it will make polymerases. The cheater can then borrow the other virus’s polymerases to copy its own genes.
In such a cell, the two viruses race to make the most copies of their own genomes. The cheater has a profound advantage: It has less genetic material to replicate. The polymerase therefore copies an incomplete genome more quickly than a complete one.
Their edge grows even larger over the course of an infection, as incomplete viruses and functional ones move from cell to cell. “If you’re half as long, that doesn’t mean you get a two-times advantage,” said Asher Leeks, who studies social evolution in viruses as a postdoc at Yale University. “That can mean you get a thousand-times advantage or more.”
Other cheater viruses have working polymerases, but they lack the genes for making protein shells to enclose their genetic material. They replicate by lying in wait for a functional virus to show up; then they sneak their genome into the shells it produces. Some studies suggest that cheater genomes may be able to get inside shells faster than functional ones.
Whichever strategy an incomplete virus uses to replicate, the result is the same. These viruses don’t pay the cost of cooperation, even as they exploit the cooperation of other viruses.
“A cheater does poorly on its own, it does better in relation to another virus, and if there are a lot of cheaters, there’s no one to exploit,” Díaz-Muñoz said. “From an evolutionary perspective, that’s all you need to define cheating.”
The last part of that definition poses a puzzle. If cheaters are so amazingly successful—and, indeed, they are—they ought to drive viruses to extinction. As generations of viruses burst out of old cells and infect new ones, cheaters ought to get more and more common. They should keep replicating until the functional viruses disappear. Without any functional viruses left, the cheaters can’t replicate on their own. The entire population of viruses should get sucked into oblivion.
Of course, viruses such as influenza are clearly escaping this swift extinction, and so there must be more to their social lives than a death spiral of cheating. Carolina López, a virologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, believes that some viruses that look like they’re cheating may actually play a more benign role in viral societies. Instead of exploiting their fellow viruses, they cooperate, helping them thrive.
“We think of them as part of a community,” López said, “with everybody playing a critical role.”
Burnout Prevention
López’s initiation into the world of sociovirology started in the early 2000s as she studied Sendai virus, a pathogen that infects mice. Researchers had known for years that two strains of Sendai virus behaved differently. One, called SeV-52, was good at escaping the notice of the immune system, allowing the virus to cause a massive infection. But mice infected with another strain, SeV-Cantell, mounted a swift, powerful defense that helped them quickly recover. The difference, López and her colleagues found, was that SeV-Cantell produced a lot of incomplete viruses.
How were incomplete viruses triggering the mice’s immune systems? After a series of experiments, López and her colleagues established that incomplete viruses cause their host cells to activate an alarm system. The cells produce a signal called interferon, which lets neighboring cells know an invader has arrived. Those cells can prepare defenses against the viruses and prevent the infection from spreading like wildfire through the surrounding tissue.
This phenomenon wasn’t a quirk of Sendai virus, nor of the mouse immune system. When López and her colleagues turned their attention to RSV, which sickens over 2 million people in the United States every year and causes thousands of deaths, they found that incomplete viruses produced in natural infections also triggered a strong immune response from infected cells.
This effect puzzled López. If incomplete viruses were cheaters, it didn’t make sense for them to provoke a host to cut an infection short. Once the immune system destroyed the functional viruses, the cheaters would be left without any victims to exploit.
Lopez found that her results made sense if she looked at the viruses in a new way. Instead of focusing on the idea that the incomplete viruses were cheating, López began to think about them and the functional viruses as working together toward the shared goal of long-term survival. She realized that if functional viruses replicated uncontrollably, they might overwhelm and kill their current host before transmission to a new host could take place. That would be self-defeating.
“You need some level of immune response for just keeping your host alive long enough for you to move on,” López said.
That’s where the incomplete viruses come in, she said. They might rein in the infection so that their host has a chance to pass viruses onto the next host. In that way, the functional and incomplete viruses might be cooperating. The functional viruses produce the molecular machinery to make new viruses. Meanwhile, the incomplete viruses slow the functional viruses down to avoid burning out their host, which would end the entire community’s infectious run.
In recent years, López and her colleagues have found that incomplete viruses can curb infections in a number of ways. They can trigger cells to respond as if they were under stress from heat or cold, for example. Part of a cell’s stress response shuts down the protein-building factories to save energy. In the process, it also halts the production of more viruses.
Christopher Brooke, a virologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, agrees with López that viruses exist in communities. What’s more, he suspects that incomplete viruses have other jobs in cells that he and his fellow scientists have yet to figure out.
Brooke is looking for evidence of these jobs in influenza viruses. A complete influenza virus has eight gene segments, which typically make 12 or more proteins. But when infected cells produce incomplete viruses, they sometimes skip the middle of a gene and stitch the beginning to the end. Despite this drastic change, these altered genes still produce proteins—but new proteins that may have new functions. In a study published in February, Brooke and his colleagues discovered hundreds of these new proteins in flu-infected cells. Because these proteins are new to science, the researchers are trying to figure out what they do. Experiments on one of them suggest that it latches on to polymerase proteins made by intact viruses and blocks them from copying new viral genomes.
For now, however, scientists are largely ignorant of what incomplete viruses accomplish by producing so many strange proteins. “My limited imagination isn’t going to touch a fraction of what’s possible,” Brooke said. “This is raw material for the virus to play with.” But he doubts that the incomplete viruses producing all these strange proteins are cheaters.
“If they really were acting as pure cheaters, I would predict that there would be substantial selective pressure to minimize their production,” Brooke said. “And yet we see them all the time.”
Blurred Lines
Sociovirologists are now trying to figure out just how much cheating and cooperation are going on in the viral world. Scientists who study animal behavior know how hard this can be. An individual may cheat in some situations and cooperate in others. And it’s also possible for a behavior that looks like cooperation to evolve through selfish cheating.
Leeks agrees that incomplete viruses may be productive parts of the viral community. But he thinks it’s always important to consider the possibility that even when they look like they’re cooperating, they are still actually cheating. Evolutionary theory predicts that cheating will often arise in viruses, thanks to their tiny genomes. “In viruses, conflict is dominant,” Leeks said.
In fact, cheating can produce adaptations that look like cooperation. One of Leeks’ favorite examples of this hidden conflict is the nanovirus, which infects plants such as parsley and fava beans. Nanoviruses replicate in an astonishing way. They have eight genes in total, but each viral particle has just one of the eight genes. Only when all nanovirus particles, each carrying one of the eight different genes, are infecting the same plant at once can they replicate. The plant cells make proteins from all eight genes, along with new copies of their genes, which then get packaged into new shells.
You might look at nanoviruses and see a textbook case of cooperation. After all, the viruses have to work together for any of them to have a chance to replicate. The arrangement is reminiscent of a beehive’s division of labor, in which the insects split the work of gathering nectar, tending to larvae, and scouting new locations for the hive to move to.
But Leeks and his colleagues have charted how nanoviruses—and other so-called multipartite viruses—may have evolved through cheating.
Imagine that the ancestor of nanoviruses started off with all eight genes packaged in one viral genome. The virus then accidentally produced incomplete cheaters that had only one of the genes. That cheater will thrive, as the fully functional viruses copy its gene. And if a second cheat evolves, carrying a different gene, it will get the same benefit of exploiting the intact viruses.
When Leeks and his colleagues built a mathematical model for this evolutionary scenario, they found that viruses can readily break apart into more cheats. They will keep breaking apart until none of the original viruses that could replicate on their own are left. Nanoviruses may now depend on each other for survival, but only because their ancestors freeloaded off each other. Underneath the façade of cooperation lies viral cheating.
Sorting out the nature of virus societies will take years of research. But solving the mystery may bring a tremendous payoff. Once scientists understand the social behavior of viruses, they may be able to turn viruses against one another.
Turning the Tables
In the 1990s, evolutionary biologists were able to help inform the development of antiviral medicines. When people with HIV took a single antiviral drug, the virus quickly evolved the ability to evade it. But when doctors instead prescribed medicines that combined three antivirals, it became much harder for the viruses to escape them all. The chance that a virus could gain mutations to resist all three drugs was astronomically small. As a result, HIV drug cocktails remain effective even today.
Sociovirologists are now investigating whether evolutionary biology can again help in the fight against viruses. They are looking for vulnerabilities in the way viruses cheat and cooperate, which they can exploit to bring infections to a halt. “We see it as turning the tables on the virus,” Vignuzzi said.
Vignuzzi and his colleagues tested this idea in mice with Zika virus. They engineered incomplete Zika viruses that could ruthlessly exploit functional ones. When they injected these cheaters into infected mice, the population of functional viruses inside the animals quickly collapsed. The French company Meletios Therapeutics has licensed Vignuzzi’s cheater viruses and has been developing them as a potential antiviral drug for a variety of viruses.
At New York University, Ben tenOever and his colleagues are engineering what might be an even more effective cheater from influenza viruses. They’re taking advantage of a quirk of virus biology: Every now and then, the genetic material from two viruses that infect the same cell will end up packaged into one new virus. They wondered if they could create a cheating virus that could readily invade the genome of a functional influenza virus.
The NYU team harvested incomplete viruses from influenza-infected cells. From this batch, they identified a super-cheater that was remarkably good at slipping its genes into fully functional influenza viruses. The resulting hybrid virus was bad at replicating, thanks to the cheater’s disruption.
To see how this super-cheater would perform as an antiviral, tenOever and his colleagues packaged it into a nasal spray. They infected mice with a lethal strain of influenza and then squirted the super-cheater into the animals’ noses. The super-cheater virus was so good at exploiting functional viruses and slowing their replication that the mice managed to recover from the flu within a couple weeks. Without help from the super-cheaters, the animals died.
The researchers got even better results when they sprayed the super-cheaters into the noses of mice before they got infected. The super-cheaters lay in wait inside the mice and attacked the functional flu viruses as soon as they arrived.
Then tenOever and his colleagues moved to ferrets for their experiments. Ferrets experience influenza infections more like humans do: In particular, unlike with mice, influenza viruses will readily spread from a sick ferret to a healthy one in an adjacent cage. The scientists found that the nasal spray quickly drove down the number of flu viruses in infected ferrets, just as they saw in mice. However, the scientists got a surprise when they looked at the viruses that the infected ferrets passed to healthy animals. They transmitted not only normal viruses but also super-cheaters stowed away inside their protein shells.
That finding raises the tantalizing possibility that super-cheaters might be able to stop the spread of a new strain of influenza. If people received sprays of super-cheater viruses, they could rapidly recover from infections. And if they did pass on the new virus strain to others, they would also pass along the super-cheater to stop it. “It’s a pandemic neutralizer,” tenOever said.
That’s true in concept, at least. TenOever would need to run a clinical trial in humans to see if it would work as it does in animals. However, regulators have had qualms about approving such an experiment, he said, as that would not simply be giving people a drug that would work on viruses in their own bodies, but also one that could spread to others, whether they consented to it or not. “That seems to be the kiss of death,” tenOever said, for his hopes of turning the science of social viruses into medicine.
Díaz-Muñoz thinks that it’s right to be cautious about harnessing sociovirology when we still have so much to learn about it. It’s one thing to create medicines from inert molecules. It’s quite another to deploy the social life of viruses. “It is a living, evolving thing,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
the neurobiology of connection: the science of rupture, repair, and reciprocity
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/31/polyvagal-theory/
from the article..
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since, we have come to see how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma; we have come to see consciousness itself as a full-body phenomenon.
Beyond the brain, no portion of the body shapes our mental and emotional landscape more profoundly than the tenth cranial nerve — the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously governs the inner workings of the body. Known as the vagus nerve — from the Latin for “wandering,” a root shared with vagabond and vague — it meanders from the brain to the gut, touching every organ along the way with its tendrils, controlling everything from our heart rate and digestion to our reflexes and moods.
In James’s lifetime, it was believed that synaptic communication within the brain was electrical. But when neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered a gap between neurons — a miniature abyss electricity could not cross — it became clear that something else must be transmitting the signals between neurons. In 1921, the German pharmacologist Otto Loewi confirmed the existence of these theorized chemical messengers by stimulating the vagus nerve of a frog and discovering in the secreted substance the first known neurotransmitter. Every thought, feeling, and mood that has ever swept across the sky of your mind was forecast by your neurotransmitters and executed by your vagus nerve.
A century after James, while working with premature babies, the psychiatrist Stephen Porges uncovered two distinct vagal pathways in the nervous system — the much older dorsal vagus, which evolved around 500 million years ago in a fish now extinct to regulate fear response and activate shutdown, and the ventral vagus, a uniquely mammalian development about 200 million old, controlling our capacity for connection and communication. This research became the foundation of polyvagal theory — the science of how the interplay of these two systems shapes our sense of safety and danger, shapes our attachment styles and relationship patterns, shapes our very ability to tolerate the risks of living necessary for being in love with life.
In the decades since, no one has championed polyvagal theory more ardently than the clinical psychologist Deb Dana. In her book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (public library), written for therapists, she explores how trauma automates our adaptive responses in a survival story that puts the fear-based dorsal vagus in command to induce collapse and dissociation, and how we can rewire our neural pathways toward the emotional safety of the ventral vagal state, where our capacity for curiosity, connection, and change flourishes.
Dana writes:
Connectedness is a biological imperative, and at the top of the autonomic hierarchy is the ventral vagal pathway that supports feelings of safety and connection. The ventral vagus (sometimes called the “smart vagus” or “social vagus”) provides the neurobiological foundation for health, growth, and restoration. When the ventral vagus is active, our attention is toward connection. We seek opportunities for co-regulation. The ability to soothe and be soothed, to talk and listen, to offer and receive, to fluidly move in and out of connection is centered in this newest part of the autonomic nervous system. Reciprocity, the mutual ebb and flow that defines nourishing relationships, is a function of the ventral vagus. As a result of its myelinated pathways, the ventral vagus provides rapid and organized responses. In a ventral vagal state, we have access to a range of responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, interested, excited, passionate, alert, ready, relaxed, savoring, and joyful.
This biological need for co-regulation with others is not dissimilar to the concept of limbic revision — “the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love,” and to have our own emotional pathways remodeled by the people who love us. This is only possible in safe relationships, and it is the vagus system that governs our sense of safety.
Central to polyvagal theory is the distinction between conscious perception and what Porges termed neuroception — the conditioned way the autonomic nervous system responds from within the body, without our awareness, to cues of safety and danger in the outside world. Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships. Dana writes:
Co-regulation is at the heart of positive relationships… If we miss opportunities to co-regulate in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships. Trauma, either in experiences of commission (acts of harm) or omission (absence of care), makes co-regulation dangerous and interrupts the development of our co-regulatory skills. Out of necessity, the autonomic nervous system is shaped to independently regulate. Clients will often say that they needed connection but there was no one in their life who was safe, so after a while they stopped looking. Through a polyvagal perspective, we know that although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation.
Because we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality. Dana observes:
The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.
Our early adaptive survival responses of trauma train the autonomic nervous system on a default neuroception of danger, replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection in a fear-based narrative. And yet these reflexes can be recalibrated by retraining our regulatory pathways.
Because the feeling of reciprocity is one of the most powerful regulators of the autonomic nervous system, a great deal of repair and rewiring can happen in relationships winged with true reciprocity. Dana writes:
Reciprocity is a connection between people that is created in the back-and-forth communication between two autonomic nervous systems. It is the experience of heartfelt listening and responding. We are nourished in experiences of reciprocity, feeling the ebb and flow, giving and receiving, attunement, and resonance.
But the great paradox is that if our earliest template of connection is marked by rupture and deficient co-regulation, our very notion of reciprocity may be warped, leading us to tolerate immense asymmetries of affection and attention, to mistake deeply imbalanced relationships for reciprocal. The grounds for optimism lie in the very real possibility of changing the template through safe and nourishing relationships — ones we may not so much choose at first, for trauma can taint our choices with unhealthy patterns, as chance into and only then choose to nurture. The payoff is a gradual transition from the dorsal vagal state into the ventral vagal, a gradual willingness to release the patterns of protection in favor of connection, allowing the kinds of relationships Adrienne Rich celebrated as ones “in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love.'”
Complement with the science of how emotion are made and how love rewires the brain, then revisit Toni Morrison on reclaiming the body as an instrument of joy, sanity, and self-love.
The Exercise Neuroscientist: The Shocking Link Between Exercise And Dementia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-tRub-0pQ
found this one to be really interesting.
take a walk.
a few of the things i appreciate about nostr is that it reminds me of simple days
- following a few solid people is enough to get you going.
- ones with skills are passing them down to get noobs up and going quickly… and for free
- the lack of noise makes it easier to get things done and step away
- you don’t need to be more than a key/handle
i haven’t been on social media for years, but looking forward to sharing my journey of madness.
#843703
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