Touch me

Just prior to walking into an IdeaFestival meeting late last week, my wife called and told me that a Black Angus cow she had bottle-raised had died early in the morning while giving birth to twins. She described one shivering calf, still wet with afterbirth, lying in the front field with her head curled around and stuffed between two sets of legs, the newborn fetal position. She said a second calf, halfway out of the birth canal, had, sadly, died along with her mother.

She knew the routine. The calf would need "first milk," or colostrum, a protein-rich concoction that jump starts the newborn's bacterial and disease defenses and is always the first meal. After hanging up, she walked out to pick up the survivor and carried her to a heated area in our barn where she would be warm. She called on a friend who owns a small dairy for the colostrum.

By now, an emerging science tells us that touch is indispensable to our emotional and physical well-being, that it is fundamental to human communication, bonding and health. Therapeutic massage has a growing body of evidence to support its practice. If you've ever raised a puppy you understand how we own, and are owned, by dogs. Surely part of that uncanny bond is the result of a lifetime of touch.

By coincidence, the following information appeared the next day in the torrent of rss feeds I consume: "Brain basis for why petting feels so good." Here's some of what we've recently discovered about the physiology of touch:

After pinpointing the MRGPRB4+ neurons’ physical stimulus, the researchers then found a chemical that could elicit the same response. When mice were injected with the chemical, the MRGPRB4+ neurons lit up, just as if the mouse was being stroked. The unique neurons were linked specifically to the hair follicles in the mice’s skin, and the nerve-endings were very spread out. Thus, gently stroking their hindquarters would stimulate the mice but poking would not. And it turns out that humans have similar, stroke-sensitive neurons in the hair-covered portions of our skin.

Newborn calves will curl up until the mother begins to remove the afterbirth by vigorously licking the newborn up and down the length of its body. Once on their feet, they will urgently (and sometimes comically) nudge and poke mom with their heads until they find the food source. In almost all cases, mom and calf (usually just one) are walking side by side within the hour. By the end of a full day or so, newborns are galloping.

After the meeting, I hurried home to find my wife running hot water over a liter 7-UP bottle filled with frozen colostrum. After the slushee had finally liquefied and warmed to an appropriate temperature, we headed out to the barn to find the calf, head still tucked, on the bed of straw left earlier in the day. But she wan't interested in food. Moreover, it seemed obvious to us that her strength had begun to ebb. We began to wonder if we were too late. Making one last phone call, my wife got some interesting advice: rub the calf vigorously up and down the length of her body. So grabbing some old towels that we keep on hand, we went to work. And within 30 to 40 seconds of stroking, the calf's ears pricked. After another 20 seconds or so she struggled to her feet for the very first time, bleating like a lamb. To my utter amazement, the rubdown had triggered a deep instinct in her to stand and find food, which we just happened to have on hand. She emptied the bottle quickly and not entirely sure-footed yet, looked around at her world, perhaps for the very first time. My wife named her Bella.

I have no doubt that the research behind "Brain basis for why petting feels so good" has uncovered important news about the significance of touch. The identified neurons, for example, may one day play a role in therapies. At the very least science knows something it didn't previously know about how touch electrifies the body. I was disappointed, though, when the article went on to surmise that touch might have developed to "encourage social grooming," which seemed, having spent the prior evening like I had, to lack imagination. I was guilty of that too, of course. I had always assumed that the licking was merely an act of hygiene, a rudimentary get-to-know-you that helped warm up a calf by drying and fluffing its coat against the elements. What I had discovered instead was that mom's licking, her touch, was scene one in an act of survival. I had failed to notice that touch triggered nursing. Whether toweled down in the field by mom or by two human caretakers, a newborn calf must experience touch to understand who and what it is - a defenseless animal being urged, awakened, into the present.

One of my favorite poems is Stanley Kunitz's "Touch Me," in which the poet, in the winter of his life, acknowledges the approaching storm. He ends with these plaintive words to his wife: "Touch me, remind me who I am." As Bella hungrily downed her first meal, I had a poem in mind.

Wayne

Who IS she?

Who is she? Who is that gorgeous man?

If you've ever spied that someone outside a movie theater or at the wedding you really didn't want to attend or just walking down the other side of a busy the street, you'll appreciate this Disney short, "Paperman." It will brighten your day.

Paperman was created with a new technique that adds hand drawn elements to digitally produced images. In addition to capturing a wonderful and all-too-relatable story, the short recalls the organic charm of Disney's earlier work.

Paperman was posted to Disney's YouTube channel this week. It's been nominated for Best Animated Short Film at this year's Oscars. The statues will be handed out Feb. 24.

Wayne

Daniel Tammet video: Math, language and sense-making

In this video, Daniel Tammet, who appeared at IdeaFestival 2010 and delivered one of the most memorable presentations ever heard at the IdeaFestival, talks with the RSA on the "language" of numbers.

Two things stand our for me: Tammet's quote from Einstein, "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler" and his observation that, in its manifold dimensions, mathematics works as a kind of literature.

Many mathematicians have said that a hallmark of a particularly fruitful set of equations is beauty. Tammet, a synesthete, sees the numbers as shapes and colors, which, as he points out in the video here, only heightens the raw experience for him.

"Simple" can also come in effect, which poets have been exploited since language first emerged from our lips. So when Robert Duncan says the sky is "diseased with stars," he's saying a particularly kind thing, that the sky has the majesty - and the finitude - of a living thing. Forged in those furnaces, so do we. "Simple" to a sculpture or painter might mean removing the excess from a theme or object or the world. Done with skill the distillation produces strong drink. And pushed too far, of course, over-simplfiying produces a caricature, or worse, banalities. What's left ceases to describe so much as mock.

While I'll never be able to take in the topologies that describe theoretical physics at its extremes, I've always wondered what it must feel like to look at a set of equations and see a universe, to see a particular beauty that would lead one to conclude that this set of encoded logic would be more likely than another to find its expression in the crushing depths of a black hole, or in the vanishingly small warp and woof of quantum dimension. It must be endlessly satisfying. 

The video is only a few minutes long. I'd encourage you to watch it. You might also be interested in this video from the World Science Festival, in which a panel, including Brian Greene and Robert Krulwich, talk about the creative nature of mathematics.

Wayne 

Does your search change you?

Returning to Robin Robertson's slim volume of verse "Wrecking Light" late last night, I was struck once again by what an enemy poetry is to comfortable thinking. Unusually tuned to the sound language makes, Robertson is adept at pairing words that work in ways that I don't always understand, but work remarkably well nonetheless. They take you by surprise. And so I get "unpuzzled rabbits," expressionless faces that are "blank as air" and a description of deep and unexpected loss as a "shelving love." You don't read his work so much as experience it in surround sound. In his meter - now a little bit faster, now a little bit slower - you hear the reedy whistle of a particularly narrow glen, the deep roar from high places, the pant of an explorer, a shortness of breath. You see an author stumbling forward. The failures are real. And like the desolate and witchy Scottish landscapes that are the inspiration for may of the poems in Wrecking Light, the words haunt long after you close the book cover.

Take a moment to read "At Roane Head," reprinted in the Guardian - or better yet, save it for tonight when no one is watching. Then for a simply brilliant comparison of poetry to a Google search, read Nicholas Carr here. He tosses in some Frost.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: AttributionNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

"Productivity" is for robots

Is "productivity" for robots?

Pointing to a "post-productive" future where economic growth isn't measured by today's standards of efficiency, Kevin Kelly argues that the full effects of ubiquitous networks have yet to be felt.

Productivity is the main accomplishment, and metric, of the two previous Industrial Revolutions. Productivity won't go away; over the long term it will take fewer hours of human work to produce more of the goods and services those economies produce. Our system will do this primarily because most of this work will be done by bots.

And

Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about 'wasting' labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to 'waste' time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It's hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of 'being productive.' Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity -- output per hour -- is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots.

Call it consumptity, or generativity. By whatever name we settle on, this frontier expands the creative aspect of the whole system, increasing innovations, expanding possibilities, encouraging the inefficiencies of experiment and exploring, absorbing more of the qualities of play. We don't have good measurements of these yet. Cynics will regard this as new age naiveté, or unadorned utopianism, or a blindness to the 'realities' of real life of greedy corporations, or bad bosses, or the inevitable suffering of real work. It's not.

In a lengthier exchange with Kelly, Nicholas Carr demurs, arguing against technology as a moral force. If you think that the future of work is important, and the IdeaFestival certainly does, then spend some time with the arguments that Kelly and Carr advance. Both think deeply about the nature of the Network, which, like it or not, is here to stay.

Wayne

Image: Attribution Some rights reserved by Jodimichelle