Reasons to be Cheerful Part 2

A biological theory of the Afterlife

Image by Jo Luijten from Pixabay

If you’re new here — and I’ve had a big rush of new subscribers, about a hundred of you, thank you! — you might be concerned you’ve subscribed to the wrong thing. Is that not a human cell? Am I not that novelist/poet person, a teacher of the creative process, who recently wrote about how ADHD made her kiss her hairdresser? (Likely story.) Yes and yes. Stick around. When you’ve been here a while, you’ll get used to a bit of literary whiplash from this scientist by training and former computer programmer, singer-songwriter, waitress, beekeeper, grocer’s assistant, therapist, and nightclub admin who is currently a senior lecturer at a British university, teaching creative writing and researching Shakespeare, Marlowe, and pirates.

Trust me. I will make ‘the science bit’ humanities-friendly. Plus this post is not just about science. It is about a profound reason to feel joy and wonder.

Image by Andrew Leinster from Pixabay

Recently, I have been drowning in undergraduate marking. Although these days, I reframe it as ‘helping people’ because that feels much more pleasant. So was I drowning in ‘helping people’? Hmm, another language change required. How about not drowning? (‘Have you tried not being depressed?’) How about ‘floating on a sea of 6-8,000-word student portfolios, buoyed up by the great privilege of being experienced enough to help these young people express themselves more clearly. And getting paid handsomely for it too.’ That already feels better.

But of course, we writers who sustain ourselves by teaching others to write long to be doing it ourselves, so here I am, to give you another dose of --

Reasons to be cheerful? Are you kidding? 

As usual, yes and no. Yes, there will be kidding. A little bit of mucking around lightens the load, and many of us are in (serious) need of a laugh. Humour can alleviate a surprising amount of tension, as documented in one of my recent ‘Notes’:

Though that one, admittedly isn’t as popular as my photograph of a tree.

And no, not kidding. I will be offering solid (even science-backed) reasons to be cheerful, despite the whole whale of reasons you could give me for being otherwise. As discussed in this post, there are altruistic (as well as self-loving) reasons to clear our damage and focus on the good stuff in life. As we improve our own outlooks, we improve the world’s.

Reasons to Be Cheerful Part 1 looked into why the new science of epigenetics gives us profound evidence-backed reasons to Look On The Bright Side because the idea that we are ‘controlled’ by our genes is as ludicrous as the idea that we are ‘controlled’ by our libraries. This post aims to expand on the rabbit hole I swerved there, connected to the structure of the huge community of cells (six trillion I have heard tell) that make up the human body.

As you will now know if you read that piece, the nucleus, where the DNA is all coiled up in its genes, is not analogous to the ‘brain’ of the cell, but its gonads. The old joke about thinking with one’s genitals is a useful shorthand for some behaviour, but not for the operation of cells.

What is it that ‘thinks’?

We probably can’t say the cell ‘thinks’. So how can the brain think?  The brain consists of cells: neurons (nerve cells). So where does the ‘thinking’ come from? Where does consciousness, this sense of self, reside? Is ‘reside’ even the right word, given that it implies a solid place, leading us automatically, and I have reason to believe, erroneously, to the skull?

The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is something that has fascinated me for most of my adult life. I explored consciousness research in my 2015 novel Devotion, but my passion for this subject goes back to my late teens. During my biology degree we wrote essays entitled ‘Can animals lie?’ and looked at chimp language learning, but beyond the syllabus, there were things that never made sense to me. Distinct and inexplicable human experiences. One of these was

the sense of being stared at.

As an undergraduate biochemist (before I transferred to straight biology) I experimented with the power of my attention in Fresher’s discos. If you stare very hard at the back of someone’s head with the intention of making them look at you, they invariably will. They will feel your attention and turn around to locate the source. How does this work? What senses do we have beyond the five physical senses we are taught in kindergarten to explain this? 

Well, as many as 53, according to neuroscientists, with more, no doubt yet to be discovered and named; you can find out about some of them in this 6-minute video by Professor Barry C Smith. And some 18 years after I was first puzzling over the Sense of Being Stared At, the renegade Cambridge-educated biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book of that title.

It was the early 21^st century, and as quantum physics (already 100 years old) began at last to have some impact on biology, it was finally possible for science to start getting to grips with this weird, inexplicable stuff which we have all experienced. Like when you think about someone, and then they call you. Or you have a striking dream where a sibling kisses you goodbye, and the next day, they die. (And all day at school, I was haunted by that dream, felt the tug of it, until in the middle of P.E., I asked my teacher to be excused, and surprisingly, something about the fervour of my request made her say Yes, and I ran home through the snowy lanes in my bright yellow gloves and scarf and hat, to find my mother waiting for me with the front door open, and my brother in a coma).

Silenced by the Reality Merchants

Life is full of weirdnesses, metaphysical glitches that those of us at the more sensitive end of the human spectrum (artists, autists, the traumatised and bereaved) experience with striking regularity but are afraid to share, in case the Reality Merchants stamp on your powerful experience, this thing you know at a cellular level (I’ll come to this) but cannot evidence, beyond your own (imperilled) testimony.

The gifted writer (and Buddhist)

George Saunders

recently asked his readers to share their stories of connecting with dead loved ones. The comments filled up with powerful and inspiring personal experiences, some shared publicly for the first time. And then there was that one Reality Merchant, who went around stomping on those experiences, demanding ‘receipts or it didn’t happen’. I understand. And this is the ‘respectable’ position, the currently dominant paradigm, but

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Now for the science bit

Shall I give you a little science that might explain what’s going on here? Bearing in mind this is science at the leading edge, beyond the current dominant paradigm, and therefore sniffed at in the conservative strongholds of ideas such as Wikipedia. This is simply because human knowledge advances by paradigm shifts as Kuhn observed; like Semmelweiss’s germ theory and Wegener’s continental drift, profound scientific advances are often mocked for as many decades as it takes for the eminent scoffers to meet their coffins.

This is the rabbit hole I swerved in Reasons to Be Cheerful Part 1, and it has to do with answering this question: Where is the ‘brain’ of the cell, if not the nucleus? What part of the cell allows (or disallows) the epigenetic factors that will activate (or deactivate) certain genes? The answer is surprising. It’s the cell membrane.

Membrane or mem-brain

The cell membrane is porous. Its surface is populated with proteins (Integral Membrane Proteins or IMPs) which, like the pores in our skin, can effectively open or close, acting as gates. Unlike our pores, these ‘gate’ proteins are varied in nature, with specific ‘receptor’ proteins which act as ‘nano-antennas’, being tuned to distinct environmental signals. Some of these signals are physical e.g. there are receptors for specific hormones, like oestrogen. But some are energetic. Which explains why our health, as discussed in the earlier essay, can be affected by our thoughts, most strikingly illustrated in the placebo and nocebo effects.

In 1985, the cell biologist Bruce Lipton was revisiting years of notes on the cell membrane to teach a class at medical school.

I was reviewing the mechanics of the membrane, trying to get a grasp of how it worked as an information processing system. That is when I experienced a moment of insight that transformed me […] into a membrane-centred biologist who no longer had any excuses for messing up his life.

(Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, 2005, p.89)

The insight he synthesized from his years of notes, was that the membrane is a liquid crystal semiconductor with gates and channels. It was the biological analogue of a computer chip. Whereas the nucleus is the hard drive (data storage unit) of the cell, the cell membrane is both the keyboard (input device) and the Central Processing Unit (CPU).¹ The membrane is the ‘brain’ of the cell.

Why is this a Reason to Be Cheerful?

What I’m about to say might be a step too far for you, and that’s fine. If the hinterlands where metaphysics meets physics isn’t your thing, come back next week, when I’ll return to reframing childhood trauma with humour.

Here, use this handy escape hatch:

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Okay, gather in close. This is science for the soul.

Some of the receptor proteins in a cell membrane are called ‘self-receptors’. They are unique for each human being. You might have certain ‘self-receptors’ in common with others but no one has ever been found who shared a whole set with anyone else (twins included). The more self-receptors you have in common with someone, the better organ donation they would be for you; your body will be less likely reject your new heart, kidney or whatever as “not me”.

What are these self-receptors receiving?

What is this “me”?

Where is it coming from?

Remember that some of our membrane proteins are set up not for chemical signals like hormones but energetic ones like thoughts, hence placebo/nocebo.

Remember that we (and consciousness scientists) haven’t located the ‘source’ of consciousness. The brain consists of cells, and cells are not ‘thinking’, though nerve cells are certainly transmitting the electrical signals that happen when we ‘think’. But consciousness remains ‘the hard problem’.

Over to Bruce:

Consider the human body a television set. You are the image on the screen. But your image did not come from inside the television. Your identity is an environmental broadcast that was received via an antenna. One day you turn on the TV and [a component] has blown out. Your first reaction would be, “Oh #*$?!! The television is dead.” But did the image die along with the television set? To answer that question you get another television set, plug it in, turn it on, and tune it to the station you were watching before [the component] blew out. This exercise will demonstrate that the broadcast image is still on the air, even though your first television “died.” The death of the television as receiver in no way killed the identity broadcast that comes from the environment.

(Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, 2005, p.190)

Consciousness Soup

So this is me, a fleshy transmitter-receiver unit, dwelling in a soup of consciousness, receiving just the strand of consciousness that constitutes “me”. A broadcast that may still be accessible when the transmitter-receiver unit conks out, as experienced by many of those who populated George Saunders’ comments sections. A broadcast that some can tune into right here and now, as with the ‘I was just thinking about you’ phone call scenario.

Lipton finds supporting evidence for his theory that an individual’s broadcast is still present beyond death in the stories from transplant patients who report dramatic changes in personality, such as the conservative, health-conscious Claire Sylvia, who “developed a taste for beer, chicken nuggets and motorcycles” after her heart-lung transplant, and subsequently discovered these were the passions of her 18-year-old motorbike-riding donor.

Bereavement is a terrible thing to go through, and for a long time, my brother’s early death (or really, my reaction to it) crippled my capacity for happiness. When death feels like a shut door, whether you are facing your own or someone else’s, life can feel pretty grim.

But if there really is more to life than these messy meat suits, do we not have a reason to be cheerful?

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Tell me your metaphysical experiences, if you’re feeling brave enough! And anything else you feel like saying in response to this post, so long as it’s not rude.

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Post-it Notes

Since last week I have

• Spent about two days writing reasons why my university shouldn’t sack me (they are having a purge because the Government have been shitting on the Arts and Humanities for a decade, and young people have bought the lie that an English degree is a waste of time, because let’s face it, totalitarians don’t like critical thinkers who can analyse the nuances of text to and communicate effectively to other human beings.

• Received news that my brother has been in a serious motorbike crash, and then the news that his eight-hour op to repair multiple pelvis fractures and initiate a skin graft went well, thanks for asking.

• Finished my undergraduate student marking. Hopefully not for the last time.

1. Twelve years later, an article in Nature [Cornell et al., 1997] confirmed this.