Children of the Fleet

Children of the Fleet

By Orson Scott Card

What do you do when all your plans work out? When all your dreams come true?

In his heart, Dabeet was already gone. From the moment Graff told him he was accepted into Fleet School, Dabeet detached from his friends. None had been close – or so it seemed to Dabeet, since he never felt toward his friends the kind of relentless dependency that others seemed to feel. He noticed when he wasn't included in some event – a party, a movie, a new game – but he didn't mind much, because he had other things to do. And now that he was preparing to go to Fleet School, he declined such invitations as he received. There was no point in investing any more time and effort with people he would never see again.

His friends, if they noticed his increased distance, said nothing about it. It was the teachers who were most demanding. Dabeet had not understood until now how much his teachers valued him. They were so eager to congratulate him – not just once, but over and over. And without Dabeet telling a soul about it, news of his acceptance into Fleet School flew through Charlie Conn. But only the reachers seemed to think it mattered much.

There was only one real surprise for Dabeet – how painful it was to think of leaving Mother. For more than a year, he had bent all his efforts to get away from her preferably with many miles of empty space between him. Now that he was really leaving, he began to realize how completely she had given over her life to him, and how dependent he was on her. Perhaps one of the reasons he hadnèt minded that he didn't have close friends was that his mother cared about everything he did, praised what was praiseworthy, commiserated with his miseries, and constantly told others how gifted he was. That which had been most annoying about her – the constant brag, the promises and lies – was now the mainstay of his life, and he could not imagine living without seeing her every day.

And yet when she immediately started trying to think of ways to come with him, he resisted her almost instinctively. Yes, he would miss her, and going to this new school would be frightening because of her absence. But he also knew that it would be disastrous it, through some fluke, she were allowed to come along.

“They must need some kind of nursing staff for the children,” said Mother. “It wouldn't take me long to take a refresher course.”

“Nursing staff?” asked Dabeet.

“I was a school nurse, once upon a time,” said Mother.

It was the first Dabeet had ever heard of it. “Then why aren't you working in medicine?”

“Because I chose not to,” said Mother. “I chose to work at the same kind of job as the other women in the neighborhood.”

“The hate their jobs.”

“And so do I,” said Mother. “Why do they do their jobs even though they hate them?”

“To put food on the table for their families.”

Mother shrugged as if that answer would do for her, as well.

Children of the fleet. Photo by Elena.

Basic Neurophysiology

Basic Neurophysiology

The brain is made up of neurons, together with a range of non-nervous cells that act in support of neurons and help to maintain their survival. One of the unique properties of the living neuron is its capacity to transmit information. It does this by “firing”. This term denotes the fact that every cell periodically transmits small quantities of neurotransmitter to its neighboring neurons. All cells in the body absorb a and expel molecules. Neurons do this in a special way. Neurotransmitter molecules are expelled from the end of the axon of the neuron, into the small space separating it from the next cell, the synapse. The neurotransmitter substance is then taken up by receptors on the dendrites of neurons on the other side of the synapse. This affects the second set of neurons by increasing or decreasing the chances that they will fire. Thus, neurons are in constant communication with each other through neurotransmitters. The communication is constant. Neurons always have a base (“resting”) rate of firing; even when they are not specifically stimulated by other neurons, the fire at regular intervals. However, the action of other neurons via their neurotransmitters, modifies the base firing rate - making each neuron fire more, or less, frequently than its resting rate.

There are two general types of neurotransmitter: excitatory and inhibitory. The excitatory type (the most common) increases firing rates – or, more precisely, it increases the chances that the next neuron will fire. In increases the chances of it firing, because we are actually dealing with aggregates of large numbers of neurons firing in concert. Each neuron is influenced (via multiple neurotransmitters acting at multiple synopses) by dozens, even hundreds of thousands, of other neurons. Thus, the reception of an excitatory neurotransmitter increases the chances of the neuron firing. Similarly, an inhibitory neurotransmitter decreases the chances of that neuron firing. Because we are dealing with aggregates of neurons, it is the overall “average” outcome that will determine whether the neuron fires or not, or rather the rate at which it fires. To take a crude example, if 60% of a neuron's inputs are exciting it and 40% of them are inhibiting it, it is going to fire, but at a level not much above its base rate. If 90% are exciting it and 10% are inhibiting it, it is going to fire at a much faster rate. The complete mechanism of neurotransmission is more complex. For example, neurons are equipped with different synaptic receptors that receive, or “recognize,” different neurotransmitters – but this preliminary account conveys the essentials in sufficient detail for the purposes of this text.

So that is how neurons work. Again, it is worth noting that there is nothing mystical about these processes that “produce” the mind. They are just ordinary cellular processes. How they produce our beloved selves, with all the richness of our inner life, must involve something more than the simple facts of neurotransmission.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

Where there is controversy, neuro-scientists can devise and execute critical experiments to test who is right and who is wrong. Typically (after some debate about whether the experiment was the correct test or not!), the losing side agrees that they were wrong. Illustration by Elena.

The Limbic System

Our Brain: The Limbic System

The term Limbic System is frequently used as though it referred to an anatomical structure, but it is really a theoretical concept about a group of structures that, many neuroscientists feel, are linked together in a functionally significant way. Because it is a theoretical concept rather than a concrete thing, different neuroscientists include different structures under the term “limbic system.” It is therefore a rather vaguely defined entity (the very usefulness of which some neuroscientists question).

However, more or less everyone includes the following structures in it. At its core is the hypothalamus. Around this core, and connected with it, the other limbic structures are arranged in a ringlike formation. Within the diencephalon, we include part of the thalamus (most theorists include the anterior and dorsomedial nuclei of the thalamus in the limbic system). Outside the diencephalon, in the temporal lobe, we include the amygdala and the hippocampus, together with a fiber pathway called the fornix, which courses under the corpus callosum as it links back to diencephalon, where it joins the hippocampus to a small nucleous but, rather, consists of a phylogenetically old kind of cortex, running along the inner surface of the temporal lobe. It is also strongly connected to the group of basal forebrain nuclei, including those embedded in the septum Several of these structures too are connected to the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is therefore also usually included in the limbic system.

This highly interconnected set of brain structures, most of which lie deep within the brain, comprises the limbic system. There are many other structures that connect with these in complicated ways, some of which are also sometimes considered “limbic.” Howere, these are not core components of the limbic system.

Limbic system is part of the basic anatomical material. The anatomical terms are mentioned time and again, and repeated exposure (especially in the context of discussion of their psychological functions) will lead to much greater familiarity with these terms and the anatomical structures to which they refer.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

In the end, we believe, we shall be able to say with confidence: this is how the mind really works. Photo by Elena.

The Sea Gypsies

The Sea Gypsies

The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand. A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk, and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea, where they are often born and die. They survive by harvesting clams and sea chambers. Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food, including small morsels of marine life, and have done so for centuries. By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers. They do this without any diving equipment. One tribe, the Sulu, dive over seventy-five feet for pearls.

But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles. Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent, or “refracted,” so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.

Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placard under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children. The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting from 22 percent. This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.

This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment. Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water – one more instance of the brain and nervous system showing unexpected training effects that alter what was thought to be a hardwired, unchangeable circuit.

The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception. Illustration by Elena.

Cultural activities change brain structure

The Sea Gypsies's underwater sight is just one example of how cultural activities can change brain circuits, in this case leading to a new and seemingly impossible change in perception. Though the Gypsies' brain have yet to be scanned, we do have studies that show cultural activities changing brain structure. Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain. A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini Etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute. Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond string timbers increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to “brassy” sound enlarge. Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains – the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others – that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres. 

Giorgio Vasari, the art historian, tells us that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he built a scaffold almost to the ceiling and painted for twenty months. As Vasari writes,“The work was executed in great discomfort, as Michelangelo had to stand with his head thrown back, and he so injured his eyesight that for several months he could only read and look at designs in that posture.” This may have been a case of his brain rewiring itself, to see only in the odd position that it had adapted itself to. Vasari's idea might seem incredible, but studies show that when people wear prism inversion glasses, which turn the world upside down, they find that, after a short while, their brain changes and their perceptual centers “flip”, so that they perceive the world right side up and even read books held upside down. When they take the glasses off, they see the world as though it were upside down, until they readapt, as Michelangelo did.

It is not just :highly cultured” activities that rewire the brain. Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations. Even leisure activities change our brain; mediators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

The Sea Gypsies are an entire culture of hunter-gatherers on the open sea, all of whom share underwater sight. For Sea Gypsies it is seeing under water. For those of us living in the information age, signature activities include reading, writing, computer literacy, and using electronic media.

In all cultures members tend to share certain common activities, the “signature activities of a culture.” Signature activities differ from such universal human activities as seeing, hearing, and walking, which develop with minimal prompting and are shared by all humanity, even those rare people who have been raised outside culture. Signature activities requires training and cultural experience and lead to the development of a new, specially wired brain. Human beings did not evolve to see clearly under water = we left our “aquatic eyes” behind with scales and fins, when our ancestors emerged from the sea and evolved to see on land. Underwater sight is not the gift of evolution; the gift is brain plasticity, which allows us to adapt to a vast range of environments.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

The implosion of the media into us, affecting our brains, is not so obvious, but we have seen many examples in our lives. Photo by Elena.

Culturally Modified Brain

The Culturally Modified Brain

Not only does the brain shape culture, culture shapes the brain.

What is the relationship between the brain and culture?

The conventional answer of scientists has been that the human brain, from which all thought and action emanate, produces culture. Based on what we know about neuroplasticity, this answer is no longer adequate.

Culture is not just produced by the brain; it is also by definition a series of activities that shape the mind. The Oxford English Dictionary gives one important definition of “culture”: “the cultivating or development... of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.... improvement or refinement by education and training... the training, development and refinement of the mind, tastes and manners.” We become cultured through training in various activities, such as customs, arts, ways of interacting with people, and the use of technologies, and the learning of ideas, beliefs, shared philosophies, and religion.

Neuroplastic research has shown us that every sustained activity ever mapped – including physical activities, sensory activities, learning, thinking and imagining – changes the brain as well as the mind. Cultural ideas and activities are no exception. Our brains are modified by the cultural activities we do – be they reading, studying music, or learning new languages. We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, the continually lead to new changes in the brain.

Our brains are vastly different, in fine detail, from the brains of our ancestors. In each stage of cultural development the average human had to learn complex new skills and abilities that all involve massive brain change. Each one of us cant actually learn in incredibly elaborate set of ancestrally developed skills and abilities in our lifetimes, in a sense generating a re-creation of this history of cultural evolution via brain plasticity.

The many brain modules a child must use for reading, writing, and computer work evolved millenia before literacy, which is only several thousand years old. Illustration by Elena.

So a neuroplastically informed view of culture and the brain implies a two-way street: the brain and genetics produce culture, but culture also shapes the brain. Sometimes these changes can be dramatic.

A popular explanation of how our brain comes to perform cultural activities is proposed by evolutionary psychologists, a group of researchers who argue that all human beings share the same basic brain modules (departments in the brain), or brain hardware, and these modules developed to do specific cultural tasks, some for language, some for mating, some for classifying the world, and so on. These modules evolved in the Pleistocene age, from about 1,8 million to ten thousand years ago, when humanity lived as hunter-gatherers, and the modules have been passed on, essentially unchanged genetically. Because we all share these modules, key aspects of human nature and psychology are fairly universal. Then, in an addendum, these psychologists note that the adult human brain is therefore anatomically unchanged since the Pleistocene. This addendum goes too far, because it doesn't take plasticity, also part of our genetic heritage, into account.

The hunter-gatherer brain was as plastic as our own, and it was not “stuck” in the Pleistocene at all but rather was able to reorganize its structure and functions in order to respond to changing conditions. In fact, it was that ability to modify itself that enabled us to emerge from the Pleistocene, a process that has been called “cognitive fluidity” by the archaeologist Steven Mithen and that, I would argue, probably has its basis in brain plasticity. All our brain modules are plastic to some degree and can be combined and differentiated over the course of our individual lives to perform a number of functions – as in Pascual-Leone's experiment in which he blindfolded people and demonstrated that their occipital lobe, which normally processes vision, could process sound and touch. Modular change is necessary for adaptation to the modern world, which exposes us to things our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to contend with. An fMRI study shows that we recognize cars and trucks with the same brain module we use to recognize faces. Clearly, the hunter-gatherer brain did not evolve to recognize cars and trucks. It is likely that the face module was most competitively suited to process these shapes – headlights are sufficiently like eyes, the hood like a nose, the grill like a mouth – so that the plastic brain, with a little training and structural alteration, could process a car with the facial recognition system.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability. Illustration by Elena.

Rejuvenation

Rejuvenation

At the beginning of the twentieth century the world's most outstanding neuroanatomist, Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who laid the groundwork for our understanding of how neurons are structured, turned his attention to one of the most vexing problems of human brain anatomy. Unlike the brains of simpler animals, such as lizards, the human brain seemed unable to regenerate itself after an injury. This helplessness is not typical of all human organs. Our skin, when cut, can heal itself, by producing new skin cells; our fractured bones can mend themselves; lost blood can replenish itself because cells in our marrow can become red or white blood cells.

But our brains seemed to be a disturbing exception. It was known that millions of neurons die as we age. Whereas other organs make new tissues from stem cells, none could be found in the brain. The main explanation for the absence was that the human brain, as it evolved, must have become so complex and specialized that it lost the power to produce replacement cells. Besides, scientists asked, how could a new neuron enter a complex, existing neuronal network and create a thousand synaptic connections without causing chaos in that network? The human brain was assumed to be a closed system.Ramon y Cajal devoted the later part of his career to searching for any sign that either the brain or spinal cord could change, regenerate, or reorganize its structure. He failed.

In his 1913 masterpiece, Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nervous system, he wrote, “ In adult brain centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated. It is for the science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree.”

There matters stood.

The neuronal stem cells I see are vibrating with life. They are called “neuronal” stem cells because they can divide and differentiate to become neurons or glial cells, which support neurons in the brain. The ones I am looking at have yet to differentiate into either neurons or glia and have yet to “specialize,” so they all look identical. Yet what stem cells lack in personality, they make up for in mortality. For stem cells don't have to specialize but can continue to divide, producing exact replicas of themselves, and they can go on doing this endlessly without any signs of aging. For this reason stem cells are often described as the eternally young, baby cells of the brain. This rejuvenating process is called “neurogenesis,” and it goes on until the day that we die.

Paradoxically, sometimes losing neurons can improve brain function, as happens in the massive “pruning back” that occurs during adolescence when synaptic connections and neurons that have not been extensively used die off, in perhaps the most dramatic case of use it or lose it. Illustration by Elena.

Neuronal stem cells were long overlooked, in part, because they went against the theory that the brain was like a complex machine or computer, and machines don't grow new parts. When, in 1965, Joseph Altman and Gopal D. Das of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered them in rats, their work was disbelieved.

Then in the 1980s Fernando Nottebohm, a bird specialist, was struck by the fact that songbirds sing new sons each season. He examined their brains and found that every year, during the season when the birds do the most singing, they grow new brain cells in the area of the brain re responsible for song learning. Inspired by Nottebohm's discovery, scientists began examining animals that were more like human beings. Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University was the first to discover neuronal stem cells in primates. Next, Eriksson and Gage found an ingenious way to stain brain cells with a marker, called BrdU, that gets taken into neurons only at the moment they are created and that lights up under the microscope. Erikson and Gage asked terminally ill patients for permission to inject them with the marker. When these patients died, Erikson and Gage examined their brains and found new, recently formed baby neurons in their hippocampi. Thus we learned from these dying patients that living neurons form in us until the very end of our lives.

The search continues for neuronal stem cells in other parts of the human brain. So far they've also been found active in the olfactory bulb (a processing area for smell) and dormant and inactive in the septum (which processes emotion), the striatum (which processes movement), and the spinal cord. Gage and others are working on treatments that might activate dormant stem cells with drugs and be useful if an area where they are dormant suffers damage. They are trying to find out whether stem cells can be transplanted into injured brain areas, or even induced to move to those areas.

To find out if neurogenesis can strengthen mental capacity, Gage's team has set out to understand how to increase the production of neuronal stem cells. Gage's colleague Gerd Kempermann raised aging mice in enriched environments, filled with mice toys such as balls, tubes, and running wheels, for only forty-five days. When Kempermann sacrificed the mice and examined their brains, he found they had a 15 percent increase in the volume of their hippocampi and forty thousand new neurons, also a 15 percent increase, compared with mice raised in standard cages.

Mice live to about two years. When the team tested older mice raised in the enriched environment for ten months in the second half of their lives, there was a fivefold increase in the number of neurons in the hippocampus. These mice were better at tests of learning, exploration, movement, and other measures of mouse intelligence than those raised in unenriched conditions. They developed new neurons, though not quite as quickly as younger mice, proving that long-term enrichment had an immense effect on prompting neurogenesis in an aging brain.

(Rejuvenation. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

Keeping unused neurons supplied with blood, oxygen, and energy is wasteful, and getting rid of them keeps the brain more focused and efficient. Illustration by Elena.

Content of Thought

Imagination : Content of Thought

One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter “a”, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter “a”. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance. 

In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them. The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and one that imagined doing exercise. Both groups exercised a finger muscle, Monday through Friday, for four weeks. The physical group did trials of fifteen maximal contractions, with a twenty-second rest between each. The mental group merely imagined doing fifteen maximal contractions, with a twenty-second rest between each, while also imagining a voice shouting at them, “Harder! Harder! Harder!”

At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect. Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent. The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that “program” movements. During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscle are contracted.

The research has led to the development of the first machines that actually “read” people's thoughts. Thought translation machines tap into motor programs in a person or animal imagining an act, decode the distinctive electrical signature of the thought, and broadcast an electrical command to a device that puts the thought into action. These machines work because the brain is plastic and physically changes its state and structure as we think, in ways that can be tracked by electronic measurements.

Experiments show how truly integrated imagination and action ar, despite the fact that we tend to think of imagination and action as completely different and subject to different rules. Illustration by Elena.

These devices are currently being developed to permit people who are completely paralyzed to move objects with their thoughts. As the machines become more sophisticated, they may be developed into thought readers, which recognize and translate the content of a thought, and have the potential to be far more probing than lie detectors, which can only detect stress levels when a person is lying. 

These machines were developed in a few simple steps. In the mid-1990s, at Duke University, Miguel Nicolelis and John Chapin began a behavioral experiment, with the goal of learning to read an animal's thoughts. They trained a rat to press a bar, electronically attached to a water-releasing mechanism. Each time the rat pressed the bar, the mechanism released a drop of water for the rat to drink. The rat had a small part of its skull removed, and a small group of micro-electrodes were attached to its motor cortex. These electrodes recorded the activity of forty-six neurons in the motor cortex involved in planning and programming movements, neurons that normally send instructions down the spinal cord to the muscles. Since the goal of the experiment was to register thoughts, which are complex, the forty-six neurons had to be measured simultaneously. Each time the rat moved the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin recorded the firing of its forty-six motor-programming neurons, and the signals were sent to a small computer. Soon the computer “recognized” the firing pattern for bar pressing.

After the rat became used to pressing the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin disconnected the bar from the water release. Now when the rat pressed the bar, no water came. Frustrated, it pressed the bar a number of times, but to no avail. Next the researchers connected the water release to the computer that was connected to the rat's neurons. In theory, now, each time the rat had the thought “press the bar,” the computer would recognize the neuronal firing pattern and send a signal to the water release to dispense a drop.

After a few hours, the rat realized it didn't have to touch the bar to get water. All it had to do was to imagine its paw pressing the bar, and water would come. Nicolelis and Chapin trained four rats to perform the task.

(Imagination. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

If the brain is easily altered, how are we protected from endless change? Photograph by Elena.

Gray and White Matter

Gray and White Matter in Our Brain

Neurons are connected to one another in their billions. Building on this, we must add that the cell bodies tend to group together, rather like debris on the surface of an expanse of water. When cell bodies clump together like this, the resultant tissue appears somewhat grayish The stringy connections between gray tissues, formed principally by the axons interconnecting the cell bodies, appear white by contrast (mainly because axons are surrounded by a sheath of fatty tissue, and fat has a white appearance). This is the basis of the famous distinction between gray matter and white matter. Collections of cell bodies are gray; the fiber connections between them are white.

The cell bodies forming the gray matter group together in one or two ways – either as nuclei or in layers. The nuclei are simply balls of cell bodies, lumped together. The layers are more complicated. They are formed when the cell bodies line up in rows. The resultant sheets of cells are typically found on the outer surface of the brain – and form its cortex (“cortex” means outer layer). There is a shortage of space in the human cranium, because the amount of cortex has expanded dramatically in recent evolution; so the brain saves space by folding the layers in upon themselves, in a wavelike pattern. This  is what gives the outer surface of the brain its well-known convoluted appearance. The nuclei lie deeper within the brain, underneath these layers of cortex – and the white matter is located between the two. The white matter – principally axons – thereby connects the cell bodies of the nuclei and cortical layers with one another. The precise anatomy of the resultant systems is enormously complex, but these basic principles are easier to understand.

Mind and brain are entwined like yin and yang. Illustration by Elena.

Brainstem and forebrain

A further basic division of the brain is that between the brainstem and the forebrain. This is a distinction of great importance for understanding some of the psychological functions. These two structures are, in turn, intricately subdivided. There are innumerable terms for the various regions within them – often (and quite confusingly) more than one term for the same structure. The terms we mention here form the standard (or most widely accepted) terminology.

The brainstem is a direct extension of the spinal cord into the skull, and it is phylogenetically (i.e., in evolutionary terms) the most ancient part of the brain. The best way to depict it is by slicing the brain down the midline to produce a medial view. The lowest portion of the brainstem, the part immediately adjoining the spinal cord, is the medulla oblongata (Latin for “oblong core”) - a structure that has little to do with what is traditionally conceived of as “the mind” (the medulla contains nuclei that govern heartbeat, breathing, etc.) Above the medulla oblongata is the pons (Latin for “bridge”). Hanging behind the pons is the cerebellum (“little brain”). The top of the brainstem proper is the midbrain.

Above this region are structures that are not technically part of the brainstem (opinions on this point have changed over the years), but they are very closely connect in functional terms to the medulla oblongata, pons, and midbrain. These structures are referred to as the diencephalon. There is no generally accepted English word for this region of the brain, although at one time it was called the “twixt-brain,” which conveyed the essential fact that it lies between the brainstem and the forebrain. There are two main parts to the diencephalon. The largest, the upper portion, is the thalamus. Below the thalamus lies the hypothalamus, which is directly connected to the pituitary gland. All of these brainstem and diencephalic structures contain nuclei that are connected to one another (and to the forebrain structures) in intricate patterns.

The forebrain is phylogenetically younger than the brainstem. It consists principally of the two great cerebral hemispheres that fill the vault of the cranium. The outer surface of these hemispheres is the cerebral cortex, made up of folded layers of gray matter. Within the cerebral hemispheres, and hidden from view, are various forebrain nuclei.

Each hemisphere is divided into four lobes. At the back of the head is the occipital lobe; in the center is the parietal lobe (situated above and slightly behind the ears); below and in front of the parietal lobe is the temporal lobe (at the temples); the reminder of the hemisphere is the large frontal lobe, which lies over the eyes and is perhaps our greatest (and, in parts, uniquely human) phylogenetic acquisition. Buried between these lobes, if one pulls the temporal lobe down and lifts the frontal and parietal lobes up, lies a further region of cerebral cortex known as the insula.

Inside the cerebral hemispheres are the forebrain nuclei. The most substantial such nuclei are the basal ganglia. Close to the basal ganglia, nestled within the lower half of the frontal lobe, are the basal forebrain nuclei. Behind them, inside the anterior ((I.e.front) part of the temporal lobe, is the amygdala (Latin for “almond,” which this group of nuclei resembles in shape).

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

Although neuroscience and psychiatry/psychology have struggled to illuminate mind and brain in its own way, it is now clear that both need to work together intimately for any comprehensive understanding to emerge. Illustration by Elena.

Neuropathic Pain

Neuropathic Pain

There are a whole host of haunting pains that torment us for reasons we do not understand and that arrive from we know not where – pains without return address. Lord Nelson, the British admiral, los his right arm in an attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797. Soon afterward, Ramachandran points out, he vividly began to experience the presence of his arm, a phantom limb that he could feel but not see. Nelson concluded that its presence was “direct evidence for the existence of the soul,” reasoning that if an arm can existe after being removed so then might the whole person exist after the annihilation of the body.

Phantom limbs are troubling because they give rise to a chronic “phantom pain” in 95 percent of amputees that often persists for a lifetime. But how do you remove a pain in an organ that isn't there?

Phantom pains torment soldiers with amputations and people who lose limbs in accidents, but they are also part of a larger class of uncanny pains that have confused doctors for millennia, because they had no known source in the body. Even after routine surgery, some people are left with equally mysterious postoperative pains that last a lifetime. The scientific literature on pain includes stories of women who suffer menstrual cramps and labor pains even after their uteruses have been removed, of men who still feel ulcer pain after the ulcer and its nerve have been cut out, and of people who are left with chronic rectal and hemorrhoidal pain after their rectums were removed. There are stories of people whose bladders were removed who still have an urgent, painful chronic need to urinate. These episodes are comprehensible if we remember that they too are phantom pains, the result of internal organs being “amputated”.

Normal pain, “acute pain,” alerts us to injury or disease by sending a signal to the brain, saying, “This is where you are hurt – attend to it.” But sometimes an injury can damage both our bodily tissues and the nerves in our pain systems, resulting in “neuropathic pain,” for which there is no external cause. Our pain maps get damaged and fire incessant false alarms, making us believe the problem is in our body when it is in our brain. Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing and the acute pain has developed an afterlife.

The phantom limb was first proposed by Silas Weir Mitchell, an American physician who tended the wounded at Gettysburg and became intrigued by an epidemic of phantoms. 

Physicians have long known that a patient who expects to get pain relief from a pill often does, even though it is a placebo containing no medication. Illustration by Megan Jorgensen.

Civil War soldiers' wounded arms and legs often turned gangrenous, and in an age before antibiotics, the only way to save the soldier's life was to amputate the limb before the gangrene spread. Soon amputees began to report that their limbs had returned to haunt them. Mitchell first called these experiences “sensory ghosts,” then switched to calling them “phantom limbs.”

They are often very lively entities. Patients who have lost arms can sometimes feel them gesticulating when they talk, waving hello to friends, or reaching spontaneously for a ringing phone.

A few doctors thought the phantom was the product of wishful thinking – a denial of the painful loss of a limb. But most assumed that the nerve endings on the stump end of the lost limb were being stimulated or irritated by movement. Some doctors tried to deal with phantoms by serial amputations, cutting back the limbs – and nerves – farther and father, hoping the phantom might disappear. But after each surgery it reemerged.

Ramachandran had been curious about phantoms since medial school. Then in 1991 he read the paper by Tim Pons and Edward Taub about the final operations on the Silver Spring monkeys. Pons mapped the brains of the monkeys who had had all the sensory input from their arms to their brains eliminated bu deafferentation and found that the brain map for the arm, instead of wasting away, had become active and now processed input from the face – which might be expected because, as Wilder Penfield has shown, the hand and facial maps are side by side.

Ramachandran immediately thought that plasticity might explain phantom limbs because Taub's monkeys and patients with phantom arms were similar. The brain maps for both the monkeys and the patients had been deprived of stimuli from their limbs. Was it possible that the face maps of amputees had invaded the maps for their missing arms, so that when the amputee was touched on the face, he felt his phantom arm? And where, Ramachandran wondered, did Taub's monkeys feel it when their faces were stroked – on their faces, or in their “deafferented” arm?

Pain, like the body image, is created by the brain and projected onto the body. This assertion is contrary to common sense and the traditional neurological view of pain that says that when we are hurt, our pain receptors send a one-way signal to the brain's pain center and that the intensity of pain perceived is proportional to the seriousness of the injury. We assume that pain always files an accurate damage report. This traditional view dates back to the philosopher Descartes, who saw the brain as a passive recipient of pain. But that view was overturned in 1965, when neuroscientists Ronald Melzack (a Canadian who studied phantom limbs and pain) and Patrick Wall (an Englishman who studied pain and plasticity) wrote the most important article in the history of pain. Wall and Melzack's theory asserted that the pain system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and far from being a passive recipient of pain, the brain always controls the pain signals we feel. 

Their “gate control theory of pain” proposed a series of controls, or “gates”, between the site of injury and brain. When pain messages are sent from damaged tissue through the nervous system, they pass through several “gates”, starting in the spinal cord, before they get to the brain. But these messages travel only if the brain gives them “permission,” after determining they are important enough to be let through. If permission is granted, a gate will open and increase the feeling of pain by allowing certain neurons to turn on and transmit their signals. The brain can also close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the narcotics made by the body to quell pain. How much pain we feel is determined in significant part by our brains and minds – our current mood, our past experiences of pain, our psychology, and how serious we think our injury is.

When a mother soothes her hurt child, by stroking and talking sweetly to her, she is helping the child's brain turn down the volume on its pain. Illustration by Megan Jorgensen.

Constrained-Induced Therapy

Constrained-Induced Therapy

The principles of constraint-induced therapy have been applied by a team headed by Dr. Friedemann Pulvermüller in Germany, which worked with Dr. Taub to help stroke patients who have damage to Broca's area and have lost the ability to speak. About 40 percent of patients who have a left hemisphere stroke have this speech aphasia. Some, like Broca's famous aphasia patient, “Tan”, can use only one word; others have more words but are still severely limited. Some do get better spontaneously or get some words back, but it has generally been thought that those who didn't improve within a year couldn't.

What is the equivalent of putting a mitt on the mouth or a sling on speech? Patients with aphasia, like those with arm paralysis, tend to fall back on the equivalent of their “good”arm. They use gestures or draw pictures. If they can speak at all, they tend to say what is easiest over and over.

The “constraint” imposed on aphasiacs is not physical, but it's just as real: a series of language rules. Since behaviour must be shaped, these rules are introduced slowly. Patients play a therapeutic card game. Four people play with thirty-two card, made up of sixteen different pictures, two of each picture. A patient with a card with a rock on it must ask the others for the same picture. At first, the only requirement is that they not point to the card, so as not to reinforce learned nonuse. They are allowed to use any kind of circumlocution, as long as it is verbal. If they want a card with a picture of the sun cnd can't find the word, they are permitted to say “The thing that makes you hot in the day” to get the card they want. Once they get two of a kind, they can discard them. The winner is the player who gets rid of his cards first.

Therapy is always useful. Illustration by Elena.

The next stage is to name the object correctly. Now they must ask a precise question, such as “Can I have the dog card?” Next they must add the person's name and a polite remark: “Mr. Schmidt, may I please have a copy of the sun card?” Later in the training more complex cards are used. Colors and numbers are introduced – a card with three blue socks and two rocks, for instance. At the beginning patients are praised for accomplishing simple tasks; as they progress, only for more difficult ones.

The German team took on a very challenging population – patients who had had their strokes on average 8.3 years before, the very ones whom most had given up on. They studied seventeen patients. Seven in a control group got conventional treatment, simply repeating words; the other ten got CI therapy for language and had to obey the rules of the language game, three hours a day for ten days. Both groups spent the same numbers of hours, then were given standard language tests. In the ten days of treatment, after only thirty-two hours, the CI therapy group had a 30 percent increase in communication. The conventional treatment group had none.

Based on his work with plasticity, Dr. Taub has discovered a number of training principles: training is more effective if the skill closely relates to everyday life; training should be done in increments; and work should be concentrated into a short time, a training technique Dr. Taub calls “massed practice,” which he has found far more effective than long-term but less frequent training.

Many of these same principles are used in “immersion” learning of a foreign language. How many of us have taken language courses over years and not learned as much as when we went to the country and “immersed” ourselves in the language for a far shorter period? Our time spent with people who don't speak our native tongue, forcing us to speak theirs, is the “constraint.” Daily immersion allows us to get “massed practice.” Our accent suggests to others that they may have to use simpler language with us; hence we are incrementally challenged, or shaped. Learned nonuse is thwarted, because our survival depends on communication.

(Midnight Resurrections, The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

I can see what you want to say. Illustration by Elena.

Love, Grief and Neurology

Love, Grief and Neurology

Love creates a generous state of mind. Because love allows us to experience as pleasurable situations or physical features that we otherwise might not, it also allows us to unlearn negative associations, another plastic phenomenon.

The science of unlearning is a very new one. Because plasticity is competitive, when a person develops a neural network, it becomes efficient and self-sustaining and, like a habit, hard to unlearn. Recall that Merzenich was looking for “an eraser” to help him speed up change and unlearn bad habits.

Different chemistries are involved in learning than in unlearning. When we learn something new, neurons fire together and wire together, and a chemical process occurs at the neuronal level called “long-term potentiation”, or LTP, which strengthens the connections between the neuros. When the brain unlearns associations and disconnects neurons. When the brain unlearns associations and disconnects neurons, another chemical process occurs, called “long-term depression,” or LTD (which has nothing to do with a depressed mood state). Unlearning and weakening connections between neurons is just as plastic a process, and just as important, as learning and strengthening the, If we only strengthened connections, our neuronal networks would get saturated. Evidence suggests that unlearning existing memories is necessary to make room for new memories in our networks.

Unlearning is essential when we are moving from one developmental stage to the next. When at the end of adolescence a girl leaves home to go to college in another state, for example, both she and her parents undergo grief and massive plastic change, as they alter old emotional habits, routines, and self-images.

Love creates a generous state of mind. Illustration by Elena.

Falling in love for the first time also means entering a new developmental stage and demands a massive amount of unlearning. When people commit to each other, they must radically alter their existing and often selfish intentions and modify all other attachments, in order to integrate the new person in their lives. Life now involves ongoing cooperation that requires a plastic reorganization of the brain centers that deal with emotions, sexuality, and the self. Millions of neural networks have to be obliterated and replaced with new ones – one reason that falling in love feels, for so many people, lie a loss of identity. Falling in love may also mean falling out of love with a past love; this too requires unlearning at a neural level.

A man's heart is broken by his first love when his engagement breaks off. He looks at many women, but each pales in comparison to the fiancée he came to believe was his one true love and whose image haunts him. He cannot unlearn the pattern of attraction to his first love. Or a woman married for twenty years becomes a young widow and refuses to date. She cannot imagine she will ever fall in love again, and the idea of “replacing” her husband offends her. Years pass, and her friends tell her it is time to move on, to no avail.

Often such people cannot move on because they cannot yet grieve; the thought of living without the one they love is too painful to bear. In neuroplastic terms, if the romantic or the widow is to begin a new relationship without baggage, each must first rewire billions of connections in their brains. The work of mourning is piecemeal, Freud noted; though reality tells us our loved one is gone, “its orders cannot be obeyed at once.” We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go. At a brain level we are turning on each of the neural networks that were wired together to form our perception of the person, experiencing the memory with exceptional vividness, then saying good-bye one network at a time. In grief, we learn to live without the one we love, but the reason this lesson is so hard is that we first must unlearn the idea that the person exists and can still be relied on.

In grief, we learn to live without the one we love. Photograph by Elena.

Acquiring Tastes and Loves. By Norman Doidge.

Intelligence and Judgement

Intelligence is not information alone but also judgement

Please, be polite

You, people, live on a moving platform, the Earth, a lovely and more or less placid place. Most of you respect the Humans and treat them as your equals or almost.  But some of the immigrants on the Earth prefer insult every native-earth-born-creature hey meet and position themselves and superior beings.

But why do you disrespect the Earthlings? In fact, human beings are rather good in understanding the world. It may seem to you that their logic is deficient (and in part it may be true, I grant you this), but they were able to hunt game and build fires to survive. And they figured out how to build a wheel. And they always watched the stars and the flowers.

Remember that in the great Cosmic Ocean there are countless stars and planets, inhabited by millions of civilisations both younger and older than this one, the Human civilisation which has developed in this solar system. 

Yeas, there is a million worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy alone that at this same moment is inhabited by beings who are very different from each other (and many of them much more advanced than the Earth).

But all these worlds have one characteristic in common: they change. And almost all of them change for the better. If you lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. So if you don’t like Humans because they are ignorant and they do not know a lot about the Universe, you are wrong!

Remember that knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart. Intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, so be polite and respect the Humans! Help them to overcome their difficulties so one day in a very distant future they might be able to help your home world…

Thank you and be polite!

You’ll find below some advice about how to explain to the Humans the external World. If you are a new resident on the Earth, you may find these advice useful.

Don’t forget to register as Newcomer at the Milky Way Galaxy Office for Aliens on the Earth (MWGOAE). Some fees apply.

Signed: Megan Jorgensen, expat on the Earth, born on the star R-1876642-12, Large Magellanic Cloud, representative of the MWGOAE in this Solar system).

Over the dying embers of the campfire, on a moonless night, Humans watched the stars and the flowers. Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

Astronomy for the Astrologer

Astronomy and Astrology

Astronomy for the Astrologer

Are the zodiacal signs real heavenly bodies? Are there other bodies in our solar system that we should know about?

One of the most common and constant complains from the astrological fraternity is that astronomers simply will not even try to understand them. The astrologers assert that the astronomers refuse to examine their evidence. For the most part, astronomers refuse to reply, though in the past some of them have shucked their cloak of dignified silence and made boobs of themselves by trying to disprove statistically “astrological tenets” that no reasonable astrologer ever held in the first place. Thus Dr. J. Allen Hynek, associated with UFO research in the press, upon hearing that astrologers linked Mercury with intellectual activity, set to work with scientific thoroughness and showed there was no significant correlation between a high I.Q. and a strong Mercury position in the horoscope. But then, on the other hand, what astrological theorist ever claimed that there was?

The contention by astrologers that astronomers refuse to review their claims is, to a great extent, true. But there is something to be said for the astronomers, too. To them, the universe contemplated by the astrologer is as much out of date as the physiology known to Hippocrates and Galen. There can be no real objection to looking at the Earth as the center of the solar system, considering the fact that Albert Einstein postulated that what is seen by an observer is, in a relative sense, true for him. But astrologers must ever remember that their view-point is no more than relative and that astronomers are quite justified in asserting that practically no astrologer knows even the rudiments of astronomy.

In these times, advanced astrologers and cosmobiologists are accumulating more and more evidence to support most of the claims made for their ancient science. One particularly important discovery is the one suggesting that forces originating outside of the solar system can have an effect upon chemical substances found in human cellular issue. Evidence such as this is lost upon the astrologer who has no understanding of the cosmos as viewed by an astronomer. This article intended for the astrologer who wants to get up-to-date of what science knows about the physical universe he uses as the basis for his interpretations.

Although the Earth creates an elliptical path around the Sun as far as our solar system is concerned, in relation to the galaxy its actual path is something like that of a corkscrew. This means that at certain seasons of the year, the Sun tends to be between the Earth and the sources of Energy which arise in the galaxy.  Since the blocking effect of the Sun is constant from one year to another, it means that the rate of chemical reactions of the type referred to will vary according to different seasons of the year. It is thought that this may be the fundamental basis for astrology.

If the Sun has such an effect, it is quite likely that the planets do also, perhaps by creating a turbulence in whatever field of energy is being emitted in the Milky Way. That such turbulence exists is evidenced by the fact that RCA Communications has for years been using planetary positions to compute the effect upon their international network.

Most serious astrologers long ago gave up the idea that the planets exert any direct influence on mundane events, but the exact rationale of astrology has remained somewhat of a mystery. For some time, consideration was given to Jung’s theory of synchronism, that is that two events may be related by time instead of causality. With the discoveries now being made, however, it seems that the nature of astrological forces resembles a field effect. By this is meant a situation where two bodies have an effect upon one another, not by virtue of their inherent qualities, but because of the nature of the field in which they exist. In the gravitational theory proposed by Einstein, for instance, two bodies are attracted to one another, not because of their own natures, but because their time-space field makes attraction the path of least resistance for them.

Astrologers used to play big role throughout the history of mankind. Photo by Elena.

To see how this works, take a sheet of cloth and suspend it by its four corners so it is approximately flat. Now put two steel marbles on it. No matter where you place them they will be attracted towards one another. This attraction is due to the depression which they make in the sheet, not because of any direct effect of the marbles upon one another.

Field effect astrology – if we may coin a term – would depend upon an analogous phenomenon. Assume a field of energy originating in our galaxy that has a profound effect upon certain chemicals in the human system. From time to time during the year, the Earth is exposed to varying strengths of that energy due to the shielding effect of the Sun. At the same time, the field is further modified by the presence of planetary bodies orbiting the Sun. In total, the astrological effect is caused not by the action of the planets upon the Earth but by field turbulences of which they serve as signals.

Aside from the astrological effect, there are also astronomical effects, and these can be attributed to the influence of other bodies in the solar system. A well-known instance of this is the sunspot cycle with its period of eleven years. Sunspots are fields of turbulence on the surface of the Sun. Their appearance is accompanied by the emission of large quantities of radiation. It has been shown time and time again the as the level of that energy increases, the Earth’s population as a whole begins to get more and more anxious.

During periods of radiation increase, there is a correlative increase in the number of riots, homicides, and wars. Communications are disturbed. The rate of plant and animal growth is altered. The sunspots increase to their maximum in 11 years. At the end of that time they suddenly subside and begin once more to increase again. There is some evidence that the sunspot cycle may be associated with Jupiter’s period of revolution around the Sun. If this is true, there is another direct effect to be considered.

There is a direct influence of the Moon upon the Earth. It is common knowledge that it causes tides in the oceans. What is not so well known is that it also causes tides on land surfaces as well. The point on Earth directly under the Moon is pulled upwards to a distance of two feet.

Though research at Northwestern University has shown that there is a correlation between the Moon’s phases and certain events in the life cycles of lower animals, there is still considerable debate about its direct effect upon humans. There is a body of empiric knowledge based upon reports of police and fire departments as well as mental hospitals and saloon managers that the Full Moon coincides with a period of aberrant sociological phenomena. So far there is disagreement among researchers who have conducted scientific inquiries into this. There has been at least one report that female admissions to mental hospitals reach their peak on the Full Moon; male admissions peak on the New Moon.

It would appear that phenomena correlating with human behaviour fall into two distinct groups. In the one, there is a direct astronomical influence as in the case of the Sun and Moon. In the other, there is the field effect in an energy stream which is occasioned by planetary positions and the position of the Earth with reference to the source of that energy in the galaxy.

The vernal equinox point, that is where the Sun crosses the equator on its way north is the point at which the zodiac begins. For this reason it is known as the first point of Aries. From this point the zodiac is divided into 12 signs of 30 degrees each.

As you probably know, the constellation that identified the original signs of the zodiac have shifted out of the positions that the held back during the days when astrology was becoming formalized, a period around the second century B.C. This is sometimes advanced as an argument against traditional astrology. Actually it is not. It is quite apparent that it is the division of the ecliptic into 12 equal signs that is important. The fact that certain constellations served to identify those signs a couple of thousand years ago was merely a matter of labelling. As a matter of fact, , we are not even certain at what time the constellation of Aries actually coincided with the segment  of ecliptic now known by that name. Estimates of the exact time made by both astronomers and astrologers range from 317 B.C to 321 A.D. Probably the figure determined by Cyril Fagan – 220 A.D. – is most nearly correct for the time at which the first point of the constellation coincided with the first point of Aries on the fixed or ecliptic zodiac. Since the first point moves backwards, this would mark the time that it was on the verge of moving into Pisces. It will, according to this calculation, move into Aquarius in about 300 years.

Can Astrologers predict the future? Illustration by Elena.

Measuring Positions in the Sky

The Earth turns on its axis at a regular rate, on revolution per day. For convenience geographers divided the Earth into 360 divisions along the equator. Those are called degrees of longitude pass by given point in 24 hours. This is at the rate of 15 degrees per hour or one degree every four minutes.

The particular degree on which you are situated is called your meridian. It is also the highest point that the Sun will reach any day. This is the location of the medium coeli (M.C) or Midheaven. The meridian passes through the zenith or the point in the sky directly over your head. The zenith is always the same number of degrees above the equator which gives them their ship’s latitude.

Sometimes astrologers become confused over the difference between celestial latitude – the distance the body is above or below the ecliptic – and declination. Declination is the number of degrees a body is above or below the celestial equator. The celestial equator is an imaginary line that runs across the heavens directly above the Earth’s equator. If you stand on the Earth’s equator, your zenith is located on the celestial equator.

Another method of measuring positions in the sky is by their hour angle. We saw that the Earth moved at the rate of one degree every four minutes. For us, that means that the heavenly bodies seem to move over our heads at the same rate. We can locate a body by saying how long it will take to reach our meridian or by how long it has been since it passed our meridian.

For instance, let us say that a body is located 15 degrees to the east of our meridian. We know that at the rate of four minutes for each degree, it will take 4 times 15 minutes or one hour to come to our meridian. Thus we say that the body has an hour angle of one hour east. If it had passed the meridian and was 15 degrees away, we would say it was one hour west.

Still one more way of locating celestial bodies is by their right ascension. This term, obscure to most astrologers, means no more than the number of degrees measured east from the first point of Aries to the meridian on which a body lies. This measurement is taken along the celestial equator, however, and not the zodiac or ecliptic. Thus is does not always agree with zodiacal measurement. For instance, a body at 15 degrees of Taurus would be 45 degrees away from the first point of Aries if measured on the ecliptic, but its right ascension, along the celestial equator, would vary with the time of year. Some astrologers use tables of the Sun’s apparent right ascension in progressing horoscopes; they feel that the Sun’s movement in right ascension for one day gives a better correlation with a year of life than does the standard “one-degree” method.

Has astrology anything to do with the real world? Illustration: Megan Jorgensen.