Cav > Books: biology‎ (199)

"..I acknowledge that there are complexities around whether and when we should consider some conditions as “dysfunction” as opposed to a type of neurodiversity that society has wrongly become intolerant to—cases of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression are all examples. That said, for each of these conditions, a subset of diagnosed individuals suffer in ways that can benefit from treatment. For those individuals, when our existing treatments fall short, we need better ways to help them. With this empathetic spirit, I use the terms “dysfunction” and “disorder” to refer to the conditions of individuals who need better solutions than the ones we can offer them today."

"I am a neuroscientist, and I have been engaged in brain research for over two decades. For a long time, I’ve been convinced that I have the best of all possible jobs: I get paid to think up new questions about how the brain works and answer them. A large part of what inspires my research is my intense curiosity about how the brain gives rise to the mind, and to ourselves. To answer these questions, I focus on memory. I investigate questions like: When we have the experience of remembering that we’ve seen something before, what is happening in our brains? How do our brains manage to remember so much? And how do our brains curate what we remember and forget?
My work is not driven just by curiosity; I believe that a foundational understanding of how memory works will contribute to future treatments and cures for memory dysfunction, including age-related dementias such as Alzheimer’s. In fact, part of my research program focuses on transforming what we’ve learned about memory into the earliest stages of developing a new treatment for memory impairment. Ours is but one example of what is known as the bench to bedside approach, where fundamental research discoveries are the first step toward developing new clinical treatments."

"Hands down, the most profound and important insight I’ve had while writing this book is that the end goal of treating brain dysfunction amounts to one of the most formidable of all possible challenges: controlling a complex system. Not in the creepy or cartoonish sense of “mind control,” but in the sense that treatments require shifting the brain from an unhealthy to a healthier state. This challenge is so formidable that there are questions about whether it can even be done in principle (much less in practice). The answer depends on exactly what type of complex system we’re dealing with.
To illustrate, let’s look at what happened when we tried to control another complex system: the weather. Today, we don’t try to influence the paths of hurricanes. Why not? It’s not because we haven’t tried. Often forgotten about the history of weather research is that we did try, only to realize that it probably won’t work. Thus, we need to ask ourselves: What makes us think that the brain will be any different? After all, an epileptic seizure or psychosis might be likened to a tornado or a hurricane insofar as it’s a complex system gone awry. Under what conditions can we effectively control a complex system?"

"..I believe we are at the beginning of a similar revolution. We are realizing that humans are not the only beings with sophisticated minds.
Demonstrations of cognitive and emotional sophistication are all around us, even in the most unexpected characters. This monumental shift in perspective provides a radically new understanding of diverse animal minds, not only helping to reshape the way we think about animals, such as the octopus, but also the way we treat them.
The more we reveal the octopus’s secrets, the more empathy and compassion we can feel, which in turn fuels a need to protect these enigmatic critters and their fragile ecosystems. Secrets of the Octopus is the perfect guide through this transformative journey."

"The light-sensitive cells in the octopus retina contain only one pigment. Ours have three; dogs, two. Researchers believe that octopuses must use entirely different systems from our own to perceive and match the colors of their complex world. Octopuses’ electric skin, along with the chromatophores and the nerves erecting the papilla, contain proteins normally found in eyes. In 2015, evolutionary biologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working with patches of skin harvested from California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides), reported that the skin is sensitive to light and can detect changes in brightness. In other words, octopuses may be able to feel light—or see with their skin."

"...I had the good fortune of attending graduate school at a time when new noninvasive brain imaging methods had just become available, providing a golden opportunity to address big anthropological questions with the methods of modern neuroscience. After subsequent postdoctoral training in neuroimaging, I began investigating the neural basis of human behavioral specializations such as cooperation and language. Sometime later, it occurred to me that paternal caregiving was also a human specialization and a neglected and worthy topic of investigation. Spurred on by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, I redirected my research focus to investigating the biology of fatherhood. In the midst of that Templeton grant, my wife gave birth to our first child, a delightfully plump boy named Toby. Raising him while researching and learning about fatherhood presented me with a remarkable opportunity for my home life to inform my research and vice versa. My daughter Mia was born five years later and provided a whole new set of lessons that helped to shape my knowledge of fatherhood beyond the mere academic. They are now twelve and six years old, and I feel I have learned enough about fatherhood over those twelve years, both at home and at work, to have some useful knowledge to pass on to others. This book is my effort to do so."

"Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung all shared at least one thing in common: they hated their fathers. All three men had abusive and strongly authoritarian fathers. Mao Tse-tung’s father beat him when he did not work hard enough. When Mao later took merciless revenge on his political enemies, he told the men who were torturing them that he would like to have seen his father treated similarly.1 Joseph Stalin bitterly resented his father, a violent alcoholic who beat him severely.2 Hitler’s father ruled the family “with tyrannical severity and injustice,” and he viewed him as the enemy.3 Remarkably, all three seemed to have loved their mothers, and at least Hitler and Mao saw themselves in alliance with their mother against their father.4
It would be foolish to conclude that these fathers were responsible for the devastation and suffering their sons unleashed on the world. Most people who were abused by their fathers as children do not become tormenters, and some even thrive. There are surely a host of genetic, environmental, historical, and sociopolitical factors that collectively conspired to produce these horrific developmental outcomes. Yet we can still ask how things might have been different if each of these men had been raised instead by a warm, nurturing father who provided strong moral guidance and set appropriate limits without harsh discipline."

"...But when the noise finally stops, you do your best to return to sleep, get back to your work, or resume your conversation. Your mind moves on to more important matters—at least until the next interruption.
This is the noise paradox. Sounds can trigger a visceral, even furious response from us in the moment but barely a shrug when that moment passes. When noise isn’t in our ears, we usually don’t consider it something to take seriously.
Overshadowed by other priorities, noise remains a problem regretted in hindsight rather than properly anticipated. Countless corporations have renounced walls and privacy partitions for a collaboration boost that often goes bust, while propelling noise to the top of the list of workplace complaints. Restaurateurs eager for a modern look strip away every scrap of soft sound-absorbing material, plop kitchens into dining areas, and pump up the music until patrons must shout to be heard. Hospitals have amassed an array of patient monitors emitting alarm sounds that overload wards with frenzied beeps, freaking out patients and exhausting clinicians. Architects often treat acoustics as an afterthought, except in special cases such as concert halls, and urban designers typically consider sound only as far as regulations require."

"The harms of this sonic neglect have been habitually undersold. Noise is pigeonholed as a nuisance or personal grievance, despite increasingly robust evidence that it’s a serious and growing threat to public health. About 12 percent of American children and 17 percent of adults have permanent hearing damage from excessive noise—a loss that not only impoverishes our acoustic experiences but severs our connection to others. Hearing damage raises the risk of depression and dementia in older adults and can delay speech and language development in the very young."

"...Here, I’d like to share my wonder at being alive at this extraordinary time on Earth. Four billion years of evolution on this planet have brought us to the brink of a new era: just decades since we first went to space, it won’t be much longer before we’re building new worlds beyond home."

"Looking at the oldest light tells us not just about when the Universe came into existence, but also about the earliest matter: after 380,000 years the Universe consisted of mostly hydrogen and some helium atoms. In fact, the Big Bang is the only process we know of that produces hydrogen in significant amounts in space. Therefore, the water molecules making up more than half of your body contain hydrogen atoms (constituting around a tenth of your mass) that are almost 14 billion years old!
Though the beginning of the Universe may feel so very far away, there is something magical in the knowledge that we are all bathed in faint, ancient light from the beginning of time. That within each of us lives the entire history of our Universe."

"All of us have an abundant microscopic menagerie, collectively known as the microbiota or microbiome.1 They live on our surface, inside our bodies, and sometimes inside our very cells. The vast majority of them are bacteria, but there are also other tiny organisms including fungi (such as yeasts) and archaea, a mysterious group that we will meet again later. There are viruses too, in unfathomable numbers – a “virome” that infects all the other microbes and occasionally the host’s cells. We can’t see any of these minuscule specks. But if our own cells were to mysteriously disappear, they would perhaps be detectable as a ghostly microbial shimmer, outlining a now-vanished animal core."

"This book will open the door fully. We are going to explore the incredible universe that exists within our bodies. We’ll learn about the origins of our alliances with microbes, the counter-intuitive ways in which they sculpt our bodies and shape our everyday lives, and the tricks we use for keeping them in line and ensuring a cordial partnership. We’ll look at how we inadvertently disrupt these partnerships and, in doing so, jeopardise our health. We’ll see how we might reverse these problems by manipulating the microbiome for our benefit. And we’ll hear the stories of the gleeful, imaginative, driven scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding the microbial world, often in the face of scorn, dismissal, and failure."

"...It can be weird to consider existences that play out in an intestine or in a single cell, or to think about our body parts as rolling landscapes. And yet, they assuredly are. The Earth contains a variety of different ecosystems: rainforests, grasslands, coral reefs, deserts, salt marshes, each with its own particular community of species. But a single animal is full of ecosystems too. Skin, mouth, guts, genitals, any organ that connects with the outside world: each has its own characteristic community of microbes.4 All of the concepts that ecologists use to describe the continental-scale ecosystems that we see through satellites also apply to ecosystems in our bodies that we peer at with microscopes. We can talk about the diversity of microbial species. We can draw food webs, where different organisms eat and feed each other. We can single out keystone microbes that exert a disproportionate influence on their environment – the equivalents of sea otters or wolves. We can treat disease-causing microbes – pathogens – as invasive creatures, like cane toads or fire ants. We can compare the gut of a person with inflammatory bowel disease to a dying coral reef or a fallow field: a battered ecosystem where the balance of organisms has gone awry."

"It’s commonly said that the average person contains ten microbial cells for every human one, making us rounding errors in our own bodies. But this 10-to-1 ratio, which shows up in books, magazines, TED talks, and virtually every scientific review on this topic, is a wild guess, based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation that became unfortunately enshrined as fact.7 The latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones – a roughly even split. Even these numbers are inexact, but that does not really matter: by any reckoning, we contain multitudes."

"Imagine we’re ten, twenty, maybe thirty years into the future. You see a doctor. You’ve been feeling anxious, so she prescribes a bacterium that’s been shown to affect the nervous system and repress anxiety. Your cholesterol is a little high, so she adds another microbe that makes and secretes a cholesterol-lowering chemical. The levels of secondary bile acids in your gut are unusually low, leaving you vulnerable to a C-diff infection – best to include a strain that produces these acids. Your urine contains molecules that are signs of inflammation, and since you also have a genetic predisposition to IBD, she adds a bug that releases anti-inflammatory molecules. She chooses these species not just for what they can do, but because she predicts that they will interact well with your immune system and your existing microbiome. She also adds a supporting cast of other bacteria chosen to prop up the therapeutic core, and she suggests some dietary plans that will nourish them effectively. And off you go, with a bespoke probiotic pill – a treatment designed to improve not just any old microbial ecosystem but yours in particular. As microbiologist Patrice Cani told me, “The future will be à la carte.”

"...I mean it. Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included. For a start, they could tell us something stunning about the practice of history (time goes both ways), the history of religions (divination is globally distributed because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability), the philosophy of mind (consciousness and cognition are not stuck in the present skull cavity or in this temporal slice of a body), and even something as abstract as causality itself (agency can act from the future). If we want to begin to learn how to think impossibly, precognitive phenomena are going to be a key to any such new order of knowledge."

"Impossible things certainly happen in numerous cultural zones and through specific ritual practices on a fairly routine basis. This is why a comparative practice is so necessary, so liberating and healing, but also so devastating to our local assumptions. Trained intellectuals who experience the impossible are commonly shocked and often see and say more or less the same thing: “It is not what we thought.”13
That is the very first lesson of thinking impossibly: recognizing that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions. That is also the humanist’s secret taken to its furthest point until it bends back on itself and consumes its own historical perspective. That is the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail."

"...But what happens if you take a tablespoon of dust or dirt and stir it into a quart of water? Add a tablespoon of that slurry into another bottle, then press repeat and dilute it one more time. If you looked at the murky blend through a microscope, you’d start to appreciate the complexity of dust. Tiny crystals and mineral chunks mix with flakes of rotten wood, legs and hairs of insects, soot, odd-looking eggs, and fibers from plants and your clothes. Microscopic algae and protists bump into each other and veer off like windup toys. Dust is alive.
If you treat the diluted mud with a dye that binds to DNA—the chemical compound that makes up the genes of all living things— and shine ultraviolet light through it, microscopic life lights up like the Milky Way, a universe in a drop of water.2 Bacteria and viruses shine like stars. Pollen grains drift by like glowing blimps. And among all these particles are the extending tubular cells, geometrical spores, and budding yeast cells of fungi."

"This book is a journey through the hidden world of fungi and their relationships with humans, other living things, and our environment.
We will look at how we use fungi, and how they use us, as we strive for a sustainable future.
Looking back, I can see that my family history and childhood experiences set me on a path with an unexpected result. I didn’t plan to be a fungus guy—who does?"

"...When we think of minds changing we usually think of psychological changes that affect our moods and outlook. Or neurological changes following a head injury or during an illness. But the changes I am interested in run much deeper. They span the evolutionary history of our early human ancestors and shape every aspect of who we are – our emotions, our memories, our languages, our intelligence and, indeed, the very fabric of our cultures and societies. It might not feel like it, but we are all heirs to millions of years of brain evolution: countless trial-and-error experiments in our mind’s relationship with the natural world. As a result, we are cleverer and more interconnected than our forebears ever imagined."

"Scholars in the new field of discursive psychology, a branch of science that investigates how the self is socially constructed, are particularly interested in how people’s pronouns affect their sense of self. According to these scholars, the self is a ‘continuous production’ built from words and culture. Until recently, the first-person pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ predominated in Western society. Now, however, dozens of pronouns are used to express various identities: ‘ze’, ‘ey’, ‘hir’, ‘xe’, ‘hen’, ‘ve’, ‘ne’, ‘per’, ‘thon’ and more. Sticklers for grammar view this as an assault on the English language. Sticklers for tradition view it as a slippery slope to government-mandated speech codes.
Yet far from being new-age gobbledygook or an omen of tyranny, novel pronouns in fact have a crucial social function. They reveal your personality, reflect important differences among groups and help knit communities together."

"Even today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV, defines autism as a condition manifesting in an ‘abnormal development in social interaction and communication, and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interests.’ But I am reluctant to accept the words of a psychiatric organisation that as recently as 1968 defined homosexuality as ‘a mental disorder’."

"...A time when much of the world has access to rigorously produced, independent, and carefully curated information on everything from our health to details about the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. There are more highly trained researchers than at any time in human history. There are more diverse voices and perspectives in the knowledge- creation mix. There is more research happening on more things. And there are more ways to access and share the knowledge produced by that research and analysis.
This is all good. And it should continue to excite and amaze us. It should give us hope that we can find rational and evidence-informed answers to our problems, both big and small. Both personal and societal."

"The present reality: our information environment—that space where we seek, contribute to, and interact with the world’s knowledge—is completely and truly f*cked. It is a tangle of lies, distortions, and rage- filled rants. This has created a massive paradox: we have more access to more knowledge than ever before and, at the same time, less and less certainty about the issues that matter to us.
Everybody knows this. It is a truism of our time. But it gets worse. The tools we use to navigate through the noise and to find some semblance of certainty—science and academic analysis, expert opinions, representations of consensus, and evidence- informed recommendations—are also being corrupted and twisted, often rendering them near useless. There are, for example, fewer transformative scientific discoveries happening now than in past decades, but research is hyped now more than ever. There are an increasing number of fake and poor- quality scientific journals that pollute both the academic literature and public discourse. It has become the norm to use bad science—and science-y language—to sell us bogus products, procedures, and policy agendas. Fake consumer reviews and ratings exploit our desire for authentic opinion. And even our search for clarity is manipulated by marketers using a manufactured and illusory certainty about what is healthy, needed, and good. We are adrift in a storm of information chaos, and we are tearing down the lighthouses."

"...The researchers paid hundreds of hardcore Fox News watchers fifteen dollars an hour to watch seven hours of CNN for an entire month. Despite the fact that many of the participants were likely suspicious of the goals of the research (“you’re trying to brainwash us with Anderson Cooper propaganda!”), the results were both surprising and encouraging. Watching CNN caused the Fox News fans to alter their perspectives, even on highly contentious and politically polarized issues..."

"While this is just one study with obvious limitations (paying people to be exposed to different perspectives isn’t a sustainable solution!), it is clear we need to consider ways to penetrate the citadels of certainty created by information echo chambers."

"...These questions occurred to me when I first met a spotted dolphin in the wild one humid summer morning in 1985. I swam slowly away from my anchored boat through the gin-clear waters of a shallow sandbank in the Bahamas. The water was calm and peaceful, and there was no land in sight. Two dolphins approached and swam around me, looking directly into my eyes. Exchanging eye contact with a wild creature is like a splash of ice-cold water on your face. I sensed a keen and mutually exploratory awareness. Ten years later, after experiencing strong currents and large sharks, I would have a different type of respect for the ocean, one that wouldn’t allow me to swim out so far alone with such a calmness. But this first experience was different..."

"This book is also an opportunity to talk about the focus of my current work: using artificial intelligence (AI) tools—like machine-learning software that can help us categorize sounds—to look for language in animal communication. With today’s discussion of bots or AI agents like ChatGPT, the concept of technology mimicking language will no doubt seem familiar.
As a scientist who has worked for over three decades to implement similar systems with wild dolphins, I have collaborated with other people, across research disciplines, to create new communication programs with our unique dataset of dolphin sounds and to determine potential language patterns. In the last few years, I have worked with computer scientist Thad Starner and his team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and we have been able to identify and analyze dolphin sounds in new ways.9 I argue that we see rules, including grammar, that appear to be very important to the dolphins. We are creating a user interface so that other researchers can use these new tools to explore their recordings of other animals."

"...Did the poor sap freeze while ice swimming? Was he squished by an asteroid or was he swallowed by a whale? Sometimes they won’t even tell you!
And when they do reveal a cause of death—say the obituary provides a tantalizing detail like “tragically killed by an oversize magnet”—the story quickly moves on to next of kin while you’re left wondering if magnetism even can be lethal. They are skipping the most interesting part!"
We understand your frustration, so we set out to resolve it. We pick up where even the most elucidating obituary leaves off.
We tell you what really happens when you jump into space wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. We explain why Boeing doesn’t let you roll your window down on the 747, and we explore the problems with swimming in the deepest part of the ocean with as much science and gruesome detail as your stomach will allow.
In other words: Stephen King meets Stephen Hawking. The upside in wading through all this gruesomeness is you may accidentally learn some science, a bit of medicine, and what to do if a shark begins circling you (encourage him to eat your entire leg— not just a chunk)."

"Sperm whales have the most expensive poop in the world. Their bile duct secretion, called ambergris, is a prized commodity in the perfume industry. A one-pound chunk is worth around sixty thousand dollars."

"...Interestingly, you would be fine. Normally, traveling through space at the speed of light is not recommended. It’s not the speed or acceleration that’s dangerous, though; the issue is hitting stuff. Even teeny particles pose a big problem when you’re going that fast—and space is not a perfect vacuum. It is littered with bits of hydrogen that hit like atom-destroying bullets when you’re traveling near the speed of light. The hydrogen would smash through your body and destroy the nuclei of your atoms, which would be fatal."

"Whenever people go in for risky heart surgery, as a safety measure the doctors first cool them down. If something goes wrong and the patient’s brain stops getting oxygen, the cooling gives the doctors a little buffer time to fix the problem. With a low body temperature your brain can go as long as 20 minutes without air before it starts dying. Under normal conditions you have only 4 minutes"

"...I had known Stanley Prusiner for some years and had been watching the progress of his laboratory in characterizing this highly unusual “microbe.” I had also seen the tremendous amount of skepticism raised by his outlandish claim that it lacked genes, that it was an infectious protein. Stan’s issue that morning was what to call this unique infectious agent. He had two candidates, he said: “piaf” and “prion.” I forget what piaf stood for, but I said that the name was already taken by a very popular French singer. Fine, he said, in any case he preferred prion, a contraction of protein and infection. I agreed. What I did not say was that prions in my native French tongue means “let us pray,” and that if he persisted with his claim of an infectious protein, he would need prayers. As we know, Stan was right, and for the discovery of prions he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997."

"The human brain contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons, which communicate through close to quadrillion (10x15, or one followed by fifteen zeroes) synapses. Those are astronomical numbers. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to construct a mental image of a quadrillion objects. It is too large. For example, one hundred billion is the number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The number of synapses in our brain is equivalent to the number of stars in ten thousand Milky Ways!"

"...Because these diseases all cause millions of tiny holes, called vacuoles, in the brain, they are grouped under the name spongiform encephalopathies—diseases that, under the microscope, give the brain the look of a sponge. All of them are caused by a protein called PrP, short for prion protein."

"But there are also “good” prions! An early and most surprising discovery was made at Columbia University in the laboratory of Eric Kandel. This group had been doing pioneering work on the molecular mechanism of memory using a simple model animal, a sea slug named Aplysia. After much work, they concluded that a protein with prion properties, but again different from PrP, was involved in memory storage in this animal. They went on to show that the same protein was involved in memory in the fruit fly and in mice. And there are more and more “good prion” proteins being discovered. It turns out that prion proteins appeared very early, maybe even at the very beginning of the evolution of life on this planet. We will discuss later how they help primitive organisms such as yeast to adapt to changes in their food environment. This field is young, fast-moving, and not devoid of controversy. The nomenclature is not yet settled. Some prefer to use the name prion only for PrP, the protein that causes kuru and the other spongiform encephalopathies. They call the others “prion-like proteins” or “prionoids.” Maybe it is time to resurrect piaf for those! But for the sake of simplicity, I will call all of them “prion proteins” or “prions.”

"...The natural (not caused by self-destructive actions of our currently dominant species) termination of life as we know it will be dictated by relatively well-understood and predictable astrophysical and atmospheric processes (unless unforeseeable cosmic events, such as an asteroid impact or a nearby gamma-ray burst, act to bring about a premature end).
We know, for instance, that in approximately five billion years, as our Sun expands tremendously to become a red giant star, Earth will be scorched, and may even be engulfed by the Sun’s expanding envelope.
Complex multicellular life will become extinct much earlier, about a billion years hence, as Earth’s biosphere perilously declines due to the rising temperatures associated with the late stages in the Sun’s evolution.
The origin of life, on the other hand, is still veiled in mystery. While enormous progress has been achieved in understanding the building blocks of biology, we still don’t know what precisely it was that caused life to spontaneously emerge, or how the very first cells suddenly came into existence."

"Biophilia explains why even today we build houses on the lake, why every child wants a teddy bear, and why Apple names itself after a fruit and its software after noble predators, surfing spots and national parks. The company is brilliant at instilling biophilic longing and affiliation at the very same time it lures us inside."

"This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have known for eons: place matters. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyperproductive presidents of all time, would escape for months to the open country. On some level they all fought a tendency to be “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” as hikerphilosopher John Muir put it in 1901."

"I’ve divided the book into five parts to help make sense of the material, and to make it useful. The first part sets up the two dominant theories that attempt to explain why our brains need nature and that drive much of the research: the first chapter takes us to Japan, where researchers are quantifying nature’s role in lowering stress and boosting mental health using a framework based on the biophilia hypothesis, the idea that we feel most “at home” in nature because we evolved there. The second chapter swerves over to Utah, where American neuroscientists are more interested in how nature helps restore our attention-addled brains to a state of sharper cognition. I’ve organized the rest of the book by nature dose. I explore the immediate effects of quick bursts, or “nearby nature” on our three main senses—smell, sound, sight. Then I look at what happens to our brains and bodies when we hang outside a bit longer to approximate the Finnish recommended nature dose: five hours a month. In Part Four, I take a deeper, longer dive into the wilderness, where really interesting things happen to our brains. This is where, in the words of neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah, “something profound is going on.” Finally, we’ll look at what it all means to the way most of us live, in cities."

"Do you imagine futuristic cityscapes? Do you feel hopeful? Do you picture billowing smokestacks? Do you feel terrified? Does it remind you of school? Does that hold a positive or negative connotation for you?
As to what you envisioned, it may have been any of the above, or something totally different still. But the general consensus of the American public on this matter can be quite easily traced through recent history. In the years following World War II, the American economy was booming. The middle class was gainfully employed, adequately fed and sheltered, and filled with optimism. Because of this, science was viewed as a gleaming obelisk of limitless advancement. It was Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. It was the Jetsons. It was longevity and prosperity."

"Prior to the internet, there were sources of information that were unanimously agreed upon to be trustworthy and reliable. Stories published by newspapers had to be heavily researched by professional journalists. Knowledge from an encyclopedia was not questioned by those who needed to reference a fact, because they were written by top specialists in every discipline, which contributed to their considerable cost. Whether we regard them as good or bad, those times are gone, and they are never coming back. Unlike the encyclopedias of old, the quality of information on the internet is not reliable. It ranges from outstanding to abysmal. For this reason, the internet can serve as a magic mirror, a place where people go to confirm pre-existing bias. Outlets that reflect what we already “know” are correct and trustworthy. Those that do not are ignored, deemed fraudulent, deceitful, paid for by malevolent institutions, or worse. This method of assessment rarely has any respect for the qualifications of those who produce the content we encounter, which has led to what is popularly referred to as the “post-truth era.”