Category: science

The Body Keeps the Score

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The first read of this year and a very thought-provoking one. The trauma, the lingering effects of the trauma on people’s lives, even after it ended up being a long time ago.

This book was written around 10 years ago. It comprises Bessel Van Der Kolk’s years of research and things he learnt through networking with people working on the same side of things.

What’s it about?

The book starts with Bessel’s encounter with Vietnam War US soldiers. Their dreams reminding them of the horrors in the war field, picture-perfect. The harsh environments and dreary circumstances of losing close friends in front of their eyes, and their helpless anger destroying Vietnamese children and women during the war – all these make living a normal life difficult.

Studies on trauma and the underlying effects it leaves in the brain, the shutting down of the rational part of the brain during such incidents. Losing language, senses, and the conscious feeling of thinking things through at the time of the trauma have been found to be a common scenario.

Bessel goes on to paint a clear picture of the trauma that children in unfortunate circumstances and households have had to endure and how the effects of it still affect them in leading an adult life. While war soldiers clearly showed signs of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), sexually abused children have dissociation to deal with in all walks of their life.

Bessel stresses the difficulty and the time it takes to find the exact underlying phenomenon beyond the common symptoms that people mention. The test of time to name the phenomenon and establish its credibility amidst clinical professionals and society, especially in the courtroom, has been really challenging, and it takes a lot of consistent perseverance from the research community.

It is surprising to understand how much the body and brain act out to protect and react to a certain situation or long exposure to something the mind is not ready for. There are instances where abused children completely forget the incidents where they have been abused unless they are reminded of the very circumstances and the senses their brain associates with them. The character they develop to mask it out of their life, memory, and body helps them only for a while, when they eventually have to bring the disturbing fact underneath them all and handle it without re-living it. Bessel found that resurfacing memories associated with trauma sometimes makes the person re-live them – the pain, the smell, the senses – that are all associated together. This may retrigger their defense mechanism and might send them back to their old undesirable ways.

The quest to make them live a normal life has been a several-decades-long effort by several researchers. Some of the treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Neurofeedback, EMDR, and also yoga, improv, and meditation, have helped victims stay in touch with their body and mind and recover without reliving the trauma.

The whole book was eye-opening, and it was brutal to see the victims, mostly children, and their struggles to lead a normal life, in spite of no fault of theirs.

Drill down

There was this particular story of a director of nurses in a hospital (Nancy) that affected me a lot. Unlike any other victims mentioned, Nancy’s circumstances do not start with an explicit war or abuse scenario. She was getting her laparoscopic tubal ligation surgery after giving birth to her third child. The anesthesia started wearing off in the middle of her surgery, and she was able to feel every pain, but she felt paralyzed to move or voice it out, and the sense of blood gushing from her body and the tubes being cut were etched in her mind. She was having flashbacks of it, couldn’t explain what she felt or did not feel even days and months after the surgery. She took on a completely different character, where she got annoyed by little things and couldn’t find joy in living life even in glorious moments.

This story was particularly too scary because it can happen to anyone. You need not enlist to go to war, be brought up in a struggling household, meet with an accident, be in foster care, or be left behind for church classes. I am sure I can’t compare the circumstances or weigh them, but when I was reading, this particular story affected me a lot. How someone can identify such a scenario and its impacts needs attention at all levels.

What do I make of the book

Bessel makes sure to clearly account for the years of research, circumstances, and the failures to arrive at something helpful for the victims. It definitely leaves hope behind in the last few chapters of the book, reading some of the successful stories of people who did come out of their trauma and started leading a normal life.

Though it does show that not any or all treatments are guaranteed to work for certain patients, and it sometimes comes down to trial and error for some who have had to endure with nothing but hope in their hands.

The book felt too focused on children and the effects of trauma on their adult life. It could have had a lot more clarity on how to handle things when it comes to adults, to prevent trauma. I understand a few circumstances are non-preventable – accidents and mishaps in surgery – and the brain does lose its function for a while, yet I would have loved to know about research in that direction. (Breathwork does help, I guess, but will it in all scenarios?)

The book does emphasize treating trauma as a whole entity that affects body, brain, and mind, and not just dealing with the mind, which was the most essential and missed-out part in treating it. The book does give hope of getting all good, even after life puts you down a long set of stairs.

Overall, the book was a good read to me, but I am not sure why I came across people on the internet saying their therapist recommended reading this book before beginning their recovery. This book condenses too much trauma in its pages for them not to get triggered. This book gives a good brief to people without a clinical or research background to better understand the accounts and eventually make better decisions when it comes to dealing with people who require help.

Bad Blood

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By John Carreyrou

Elizabeth Holmes, and her ambitions, driven by a unquenchable zeal to be an impact on this world, guided by misinterpreted examples and accompanied by the fear of failure.

This is simply the one line description of how Holmes found her path to an epic scandal.

Bad blood – is John Carreyrou, WallStreet Jounal‘s attempt to accumulate and unleash the facts of Theranos, a startup that aims to performs most of the tests on blood with just a prick in the finger, rather than venous draws (using needle at the vein).

Holmes starts off as a Stanford dropout from chemical engineering. She wants to do big in business, and finds silicon valley as the perfect hub to work towards her dream. She draws inspiration from Steve Jobs, though he works in a completely different field, where unkept promises don’t cost lives of people.

With every chapter of the book, I was appalled to see what extent was Holmes ready to pursue when she was faced by a hurdle towards her goal.

The one that affected me the most was Ian Gibbons incident. It is brutal, how they brushed off Gibbons and continued to work as if nothing changed.

Like a ponzi scheme, forming a pyramid of lies, it is sometimes to see how Holmes and her ex-boyfriend Sunny were brave enough to go this far into deceiving investors with tons of money collected on promises that can never be delivered.

True to the name, the book was devastatingly portraying how a bit of confidence and some set up stereotypes can take you far enough, costing lives along the way.

Every page was something even more impactful than the earlier.

It is a must-read if you are more interested in corporate politics, how venture capitalists can fail and some background stories of lawsuits that are brought out in US courts. For me, it was Elizabeth Holmes’ mind that intrigued, how she managed to believe when clearly the world was against it.

Ironically, she stated the same in an interview.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions

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By Stephen Hawking

credits: http://www.cairowestmag.com/

Stephen Hawking, all I remember when I come across the name is, a geeky and humorous person with a machine voice. No wonder, even if you remember the same. I am not so much into science to know every scientist with path breaking innovations. I am just curious about science, so I read books who try to explain the world in simple terms to me. And Stephen Hawking does that work pretty neatly.

This book answers to 10 questions. As the title suggests they are 10 big questions in terms of the concepts and the scientist had done a wonderful job, explaining it without bringing in complex mathematics and making it simple.

If you had this nerdy friend, who has answers to every question you ask (like literally), you sometimes think, why can’t I know them? What is so big about that? Maybe, you are bad at analytical things (there are books that can help you with that too). But this book gives you a clear-cut idea without knowing much of the complex things. It gives you the concept. You need not have a prior knowledge to read this book. Even if you get stuck, googling it would set you on track.

I am going to brief on my favorite 5 questions.

  1. Is there a God?

So, we all say God is the creator of the universe. In fact, it was his job, that gave birth to the sun, the earth and the humans. Scientists can’t acknowledge things that don’t fit under logic, so, without a logical explanation for existence of God, they look for other means for the creation of the universe.

So, there are 3 essentials that make up the universe.

  1. energy
  2. mass
  3. space

Einstein has proved that mass and energy are same. So it is just 2 things now, energy and space. Big bang theory is to explain how energy and space can materialise out of nothing. The answer is negative energy: when big bang introduced lot of positive energy, it produced equal amount of negative energy simultaneously, that’s what makes the total energy of the universe to be 0.

If the universe adds up to nothing, you need a God to create it. At quantum level, it is possible for a proton to disappear and appear somewhere else. Since universe was once the size of proton, it is possible for the universe to appear where it is now, and the release of positive energy has created what we know today?

He brings an interesting question again, “So God created the quantum laws, right?”

Then he explains, there is no time at the beginning of the universe, so how can God exist when there is no time, to create them later.

It’s true that science does not answer all the questions we have, but we have come a long way and it won’t take much longer time for science to explain them.

2. Is there other Intelligent Life in the Universe?

This is the most interesting question. Obviously, with all the movies and fiction books out there, existence of aliens is believed by many people. (Don’t ask me what I believe in!)

We, humans, witness the world the way, that makes the human existence as indispensable at the end. The world, we survive has its own physical constants, that help our existence. So with a change in the physical constants, we can derive conclusions on what kind of lives that world can support.

Darwin’s evolution theory makes us humans, nothing but an admirable showcase of evolution. We are lucky to live in this planet for these long years, without the universe throwing at us anything violently. Because, universe is a violent place out there, and we are merely lucky for nothing has happened to us all these years.

So if aliens existed in some other universes, and if they were intelligent, they would have contacted us by now, is what he says.

But yeah recently, we have some governments telling us aliens had already established connections and a scientist claiming that an asteroid that passed by earth in 2017 is an alien vehicle. There are no scientific claims made to prove them right. They are merely rumors and speculations. So, let’s wait till they reach us 🙂

3. Is time travel possible?

To travel in time, we need a vehicle that can travel faster than the speed of light. So, warping space and time makes it possible. But warping it would give virtual particles real energy hindering the same possibility.

In other words, with current theories, scientists are still working on it, playing with the ideas of possibilities. So, not yet, maybe in future.

By the way, I thought of sharing this, Hawking threw a party on a day and gave invitations for the party on the next day. Since none turned up at the party, he concluded that maybe time travel is still not possible for future humans. This was interesting to share.

4. Should we colonise Space?

With NASA and beyond it, Elon Musk working actively to colonise Mars, since he utterly believes that we will destroy the earth someday, or if earth gets destroyed by other foreign entities, we need a place to continue the existence of human race. On the other hand, there is this question by humanitarians, what is the need to invest a lot in space colonisation, when there are billions of people who could make use of the money to get their food.

Hawking explains that, exploring space is an essential just like Columbus tried to explore. In 1000 years, earth would become uninhabitable, and it is essential we find some other entity to continue our race in future. He also says that as of now, Mars is the most prospect with moon as base and humans need to habitate by atleast 2070.

Quite interesting, what do you think?

5. Will AI outsmart us?

Musk said it would. So what does Hawking has to say?

Hawking brought an interesting concept. Genetic Engineering. By the time, when AI becomes capable of surpassing humans, we would have made great progress at genetic engineering and nations would have signed a pact for proper usage of it. So we humans can outsmart them using genetic engineering to manufacture us, bypassing the slow evolution and ensuring survival against AI.

This is was the most fascinating as well as intriguing concept I learnt about.

There are yet 5 questions and you must really read the book for wonderful journey into the answers for the above 5. I just gave a glimpse of it.

Rating; 4.5/5

To buy the book, click here.