Of Mice and Men
August 15. While we wait for a thunderstorm here, or so it feels, grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
Before I had my epiphany yesterday about why our mind makes us prone to be manipulated, I talked about how the introduction of funeral rites in Pre-Dynastic Egypt hacked the human world generation protocol, eliminated the existing natural support networks, and created new networks of obligation and debt, and what central role stroking fear, the fear of ghosts in this case, played. The imagination, our mind is based on. Today, I want to show you how the hack of the mind ultimately changes our body.
Let’s start our journey of discovery in the Netherlands during WWII. The Nazis occupied the country. Now, the Nazis as well as Egyptian dynasties – but let’s face it, also nation-states that define themselves via sovereignty over a territory and a people aka holding the monopoly of violence – are only possible once the human world generation protocol has been hacked. This has results like the elimination of existing natural support networks and more or less severe shifts of the tilt of the explore/exploit balance away from exploration and towards the exploitation of existing information for the benefit of what we today know as the upper one percent. With the Nazis the results were very grave. The Dutch resisted. So the Nazis created a man-made famine. The Dutch starved. Many thousands died. But something else happened. The children and even grand-children of the survivors often suffered of metabolic problems. How?
Bianca Jones Marlin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, is researching how experiences can impact the makeup of our body for generations – make them fit for the results of a hack of the human world generation protocol, so that we might accept the resulting conditions as normal even though they are far from it. For her study Marlin presented mice with the scent of almonds. The scent of almonds triggers a certain receptor in the mice’s nose. She combined the scent of almonds with a tiny electric shock. Whenever there was the scent of almonds present and the receptors got triggered, there was a tiny shock. After a while, Marlin noticed that the mice had grown more almond receptors in their noses because their experiences had taught the mice that the scent of almond was something to pay special attention to. It was a lesson they handed on to their offsprings because they too were born with more almond receptors in their noses.
How? Despite what most people think it’s not our DNA but bio-electricity that tells cells what they should build on a certain place. Mind me, bioelectricity – the cognitive glue that merges cells into a higher level pattern – doesn’t tell them how they should do that. That’s encoded in other ways like DNA that explains how different types of proteins are formed. Bioelectricity is on a higher level of management than that. And in the shocked mice the CEO tells cells that up to then had minded their own business to build more almond receptors at certain spots in the nose. Why? Because the mind – probably the cell collective that’s the mice’s body too – wanted more information just like the one it already got from the existing receptors to implement them into its model of the world. The little shock just had made detecting the energy pattern that we recognize as an almond as so much more interesting, so much more worth interacting with to give the material things combined in the mice a chance to get closer to their goals (lowest energy level, equilibrium with surroundings). Interesting enough, that the memory of the way energy should be directed through a mouse to create the best suitable mouse in the current surroundings - how the energy pattern that makes up the mouse - is handed on to the following generations. It’s very much like the two headed planaria from Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University whose body schema was changed via the pathway of bioelectricity and they create two-headed offsprings henceforth until told otherwise. Just that the interference happened on different levels.
It's all a mirage though. The mice’s world generation protocol was hacked as was that of the planaria and now their model of the world that they generate contains mistakes as in: not everything is geared towards achieving the twin goals of the material things united in the animals. And yet, this model is the reality they now live in, the reality that they assume as normal, and for which they even change their bodily makeup. What’s really normal per the physical universe will be experienced as a deviation, making it hard to return to it. The harder, the more the initial hack is reenforced, no matter whether living by the new normal makes us physically or mentally sick. Like in the case of the Dutch children and grand-children and their metabolic problems. Or all of us and our physical and mental problems because the influences of society on our world generation process leave us with a model of the world that’s not even the limited presentation of the physical universe it could be, but that is the model according to which energy is directed and our body is assembled for.
Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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