Category: Favourites

  • Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Under-Rated Organ

    Giulia Enders

    When you think of it, it’s quite amazing how emotions we might attribute to the mind find metaphors related to another part of the body – ‘gut feel’, ‘butterflies in the stomach’, ‘sh*t your pants’, ‘pit in your stomach’ and so on. The metaphors are based on actual physical sensations, and so on hindsight, it is quite obvious that the gut and the brain have quite a connection.

    If we consider our development as an embryo, it goes along three ‘tubes’ – cardio-vascular, nervous, and the gut systems. But unlike the heroes of the first two – the heart and the brain, who have attention and literature, we rarely even think about the gut unless we have an ailment. But it is amazingly complex, with links to even something like mental health, and that’s what makes “the inside story of our body’s most underrated organ” a really interesting read.

    Giulia Enders does an excellent job of breaking down the complexities, much like some of her favourite bacteria that find a mention in the book! The book is not just accessible but entertaining too, with fun illustrations popping up on a regular basis. However, despite not sounding like a boring thesis, the book is full of not just information, but insight. This goes all the from the scenes of the behind like how does pooing work, and the kinds of poo, to behind-the-scenes walkthroughs of important and not-so-known processes like the gut structure and how organs transport food, to practical advice on everything from allergies, things like reflux and constipation, and diets, to cleanliness, and the MCU equivalent of the microbes in our gut.

    As someone who has been at the mercy of clueless gastro-intestinal practitioners, I’d say that her stated aim of making information available to a broad audience is in itself worthy of an applause. An absolutely fascinating read, even if you’re only vaguely interested in this inner piece of ours!

    Things I learned
    – The gut accounts for two-thirds of our immune system
    – There are inner and outer sphincters, representing our unconscious inner world and our consciousness respectively. Their understanding of the respective spaces, and their ‘conversations’ and relationship determine when you fart, or when you have to just go!
    – Squatting is indeed the best way to defecate, as it leads to a nice, straight intestinal tract. This is scientifically proven in the book
    – Saliva is basically filtered blood! It also contains a painkiller stronger than morphine, called opiorphin. Because the mouth is super sensitive thanks to more nerve endings than any other part of the body
    – The stomach is shaped like ‘Quasimodo’ so that water and food can be treated separately
    – Lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it’s a deficiency – the body not having the enzyme to break the two sugar molecules. In 75% of the population, the gene for digesting lactose begins to switch off as we grow older because we are no longer reliant on mother’s milk
    – Rumbling tummy is the ‘migrating motor complex’ at work. And it’s more from the small intestine. Housekeeping when that and the stomach are empty. If something enters, the process stops. In this context, regular snacking isn’t a good idea, and needs separation of at least 5 hours
    – Solve constipation with dietary fibres, fluids, pro and prebiotics
    – The extraordinary story of the sea squirt, which navigates the oceans, finds a good place to settle down, and then proceeds to eat its own brain!
    – Irritable bowel syndrome could be caused by micro inflammations, bad gut flora or undetected food intolerances (but as you might have experienced, doctors pooh pooh patients as hypochondriacs or malingerers!)
    – The brain can receive information from the gut at the insular cortex. Bud Craig’s theory is that human self awareness originates in the insular cortex. It consists of three hypothesis – this part gets info from all over the body and organises it to form an image – a representation of our feelings. The second part of the hypothesis is that the purpose of the brain is to create movement – for the best life possible. The third part of the hypothesis is that to make the best possible movement, the images are important and the brain and the gut are both qualifiers for the central role in giving this information
    – Gut bacteria vary by geography too – climate, food etc all play a part
    – “Genes are possibilities. Genes are information. Genes can be dominant, forcing features on you or they can just offer their abilities for us to use or not. But most of all, genes are plans.” Lovely!
    – Our collective gut bacteria have 150 more times genes than a human. Who are we really made of!
    – Gut bacteria are of 3 types- bactericides, prevotella, ruminococcus.
    – Haem is needed for many things, like production of blood. Its lack is a genetic defect that has been seen in Romania – results in symptoms that include garlic intolerance, sensitivity to sunlight, and red urine. Vlad!
    – Yoghurt is nothing but milk pre-digested by bacteria. Buy ones that use bacteria that produce dextrorotatory lactic acids rather than levorotatory.
    – Lactobacillus Reuteri can significantly lower cholesterol and lipid levels, and increase HDL
    – A toxoplasmata infection causes our immune system to activate an enzyme IDO which breaks down the substance the invaders like to eat and forces them to enter a dormant state. But this eatable is also an ingredient needed to produce serotonin. This potentially causes suicidal behaviour.
    -Eat prebiotic dishes

    Gut : The Inside Story of Our Bodys Most Under-Rated Organ

  • The Year of Magical Thinking

    Joan Didion

    “We never know we go,—when we are going
    We jest and shut the door;
    Fate following behind us bolts it,
    And we accost no more    .” ~ Emily Dickinson

    Death and illness is around us, and as we grow older, even more so. Or maybe we become even more conscious of it. And yet, it is as Yudhishtira answered the Yaksha’s question – “What is the greatest wonder?” with “Day after day countless people die. Yet the living wish to think they will live forever. O Lord, what can be a greater wonder?”

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  • The Molecule of More

    Daniel Z. Lieberman, Michael E. Long

    The ‘molecule of more’ whose machinations make you desire what you don’t have, and drives you to seek new things. That which offers rewards when you obey it, and punishes you when you don’t. Dopamine, whose fingerprint is visible in most of the thoughts and actions we do on a daily basis, is the subject of the book. Discovered in 1957 by Kathleen Montagu, and first thought of as a pleasure molecule, only .0005% of brain cells produce it, but it has a disproportionate influence on us.

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  • Happy Money

    Ken Honda

    I’m a big fan of The Psychology of Money and really didn’t think there’d be another money book that would interest me to this extent. I bought the book thanks to an article about it (at CapitalMind), which convinced me that the book had several insights that would be helpful.

    As with the other book, this one too is less about investing/trading tips and secrets, and instead deals the subject with a light touch. By attaching the quality of happiness to money itself, he quickly points out the difference between happy money (e.g. being paid by a happy client for work you love to do) and unhappy money (e.g. taxes, salary for a job you hate). Money, according to Honda, is energy (current – currency) and the energy with which you give and receive money defines your relationship with it. It has some common functions – saving, exchange, growth, but our relationship with it is subjective. And we all want to win. But the big insight here? ‘Winning is not how well you do financially. It is how good you feel about playing.‘

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  • The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

    Olivia Laing

    The Lonely City was a book that had been on my list for a while now, thanks to quotes from it reaching me from various sources. I now realise why a lot of people hold it in high regard. It’s not just the deep and poignant insights about loneliness, and its connection to art, but also how this relates to our humanity. 
    Olivia Laing uses the loneliness she developed when she moved to New York in her mid-thirties to explore the city and the feeling through art. In eight chapters, she fixes her gaze on the life and work of artists, some well-known and some unknown (to me) who have used their art in different ways to cope with their feeling of loneliness. 

    The connection between all of them is the liminality in which they operated – the edges of society’s discourse. I found two of them especially poignant. Henry Darger, born in the slums of Chicago in 1892, and who at the age of eight was sent first to a Catholic boys’ home and then to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, and later spent almost six decades rolling bandages and sweeping floors in the city’s Catholic hospitals. It was only posthumously that he was recognised and attained fame. A lonely person who lived on the sidelines of society but whose art radiated unique perspectives. 

    The other is Valerie Solanas, who appears in the narrative of Andy Warhol (she attempted to murder him in 1968). Except for a few years, her life never really looked up. Hers was a vicious cycle of loneliness, her own mistrust and withdrawal fed by the society which shunned her. Her life just kept spiralling downwards until her death, alone in a welfare hotel, with her body being discovered after three days. 
    But towards the end of The Lonely City, Laing also shows how art is not only a medium of expression, but also a way in which the individual is trying to connect with those around him/her. An excellent read if only for the many perspectives of loneliness. 

    As she writes in her dedication, “If you’re lonely, this one’s for you”

    Some of my favourite sections in The Lonely City: 

    Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.

    What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. 

    People who hoard are often socially withdrawn. Sometimes the hoarding causes isolation, and sometimes it is a palliative to loneliness, a way of comforting oneself. Not everyone is susceptible to the companionship of objects; to the desire to keep and sort them; to employ them as barricades or to play back and forth between expulsion and retention. On an autism website, I’d come across a discussion on the subject, in which someone had encapsulated the desire beautifully, writing: ‘Yes, very much a problem for me and while I’m not sure if I personify objects I do tend to develop some weird sort of loyalty to them and it’s difficult to dispose of them. 

    Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it. 

    Like Harris, Warhol could see that technology was going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve fame; intimacy’s surrogate, its addictive supplanter.

    The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. Only the homeless and the dispossessed seemed exempt, though that’s not counting the street kids who spent every day hanging out in the Apple store on Broadway, keeping up on Facebook even – especially, maybe – if they didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows what it looks like. I can’t count how many pieces I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. Despite an advert then prevalent on the subway that declared ‘Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again’, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected, misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up. 

    That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computer can participate, can become a minor deity of Tumblr or YouTube, commanding thousands with their make-up advice or ability to decorate a dining table, to bake the perfect cupcake. A prepubescent in a sweater with a knack for throwing shade can grip 1,379,750 subscribers, declaring it’s hard to explain myself so those are what my videos are for!! And then you run the hashtag lonely through Twitter, can’t vibe with anybody lately #lonely, seven favourites; I love seeing people that I asked to do things with not reply to me and then do things without me. #lonely, one favourite; I’m having one of those nights. Too much thinking time #lonely I sound like a fucking sook with lots of cats. I wish I had a cat, no favourites.

    The Lonely City