Star Wars Midi-chlorians On Earth?

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was a HUGE success and is being released on Blu-ray and DVD today. Fans seems to be in agreement that J.J. Abrams did a better job reviving the franchise than George Lucas did with the Star Wars prequels, which caused a great disturbance in the Force.


While Jar Jar Binks soured the prequels for most people, one of the other sticking points was the Midi-chlorians. The what? Let's review. In the original series, the Force was described by Obi-Wan Kenobi as "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." In episode I, Qui-Gon Jinn delivered the buzzkill message that the mysterious Force actually had a biological explanation. Instead of saying, “The Force is strong with this one”, one may as well say, “The Midi-chlorians are numerous in this one.”


Watching the interview below, Abrams appeared to show disdain for the whole "Midi-chlorian" idea, not even mentioning them in the new film.

According to Wookieepedia, “Midi-chlorians were intelligent microscopic life forms that lived symbiotically inside the cells of all living things. When present in sufficient numbers, they could allow their host to detect the pervasive energy field known as the Force.” A collective groan could be felt through movie theatres worldwide, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror…

To a cell biologist, it sounds like Lucas drew his inspiration from the mitochondria, which are bacteria-like symbionts that work with our cells to provide energy. They even look like they might be cousins (see below). But that is where the similarities end. Unlike Midi-chlorians, mitochondria do not allow us to tap into energy fields…no matter how much we try to quiet our minds to hear our mitochondria speak to us.

Midi-chlorian (left) and mitochondria (right). Brothers from another mother?

 

But a strange and provocative paper by Alexander Panchin and colleagues proposes an unorthodox new idea called the “biomeme hypothesis”, which posits that the impulse behind some religious rituals could be driven by mind-altering parasites.

Let that sink in for a moment. Might your religion, or any number of other activities, be driven in part by parasites or symbionts in your brain? Before you dismiss the idea too quickly, think about the rabies virus. This super tiny virus is notorious for altering the behavior of dogs (and other animals, including people). Rabies can make even the most docile of dogs become uncharacteristically aggressive so that they bite and spread the virus. Rabies virus is just the tip of the iceberg; there is no shortage of parasites that are known to eerily alter their host’s behavior.

Rabies makes dogs aggressive to enhance viral transmission. The virus can get into a new host by causing its current host to bite others.

Central to Panchin’s hypothesis is the idea that certain religious rituals may facilitate the transmission and spread of parasites. The authors site that holy springs and holy water are replete with numerous microbes, including human pathogens. Sacred in Hinduism, the Ganges River probably contains the most, as an estimated 200 million liters of untreated human sewage is dumped into it every day. Bathing in this “purifying” water has led to the development of multiple diseases, such as cholera.  The Hindu “side-roll” ritual is associated with Cutaneous Larva Migrans, also known as “creeping eruption of the skin”, which is caused when the skin becomes infected with parasitic hookworm larvae. Performed in Muslim communities, ritual ablution, which involves irrigation of the sinuses, has been proposed to be a potential risk factor in contracting Naegleria fowleri (the infamous “brain-eating amoeba”) in Muslim communities. Outbreaks of respiratory infectious diseases and meningococcal disease are common amongst Hajj congregation in Mecca. The transmission of herpes has been reported in the Jewish circumcision method known as metzitzah, which involves the sucking of blood from the wound. Finally, many sacred relics are kissed or handled by many worshipers, offering additional routes for the potential transmission of multiple infectious agents.

While it is clearly demonstrable that certain religious rituals have inherent health risks, there currently is no direct evidence that any of the possible infections transmitted can influence the victim’s behavior (other than causing them to see a doctor). Until new data arrives, we are left with the conclusion that the rituals people engage in stem from cultural memes rather than biological. But one thing is clear:  you should use some hand sanitizer next time you dip your fingers in the holy water.

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan
Follow Bill on Twitter

 

 

Panchin AY, Tuzhikov AI, & Panchin YV (2014). Midichlorians--the biomeme hypothesis: is there a microbial component to religious rituals? Biology direct, 9 (1) PMID: 24990702

Heaven or Hallucination?

Benjamin Franklin once proclaimed, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." While most of us can begrudgingly deal with taxman, we have a much harder time facing the Grim Reaper. It is this fear of the finite that has put the notion of an afterlife at the center of many world religions. Like a good book, we simply don’t want our life's story to end, so most people believe that there must a sequel.

Long ago, people used to think that Heaven was up in the sky. Led Zeppelin even implied that Heaven was accessible via a stairway available for purchase. A more modern idea is that Heaven is transcendental, perhaps in another dimension that is inaccessible to scientific instruments.

What does science have to say on the subject of Heaven and the afterlife? Ancient notions that Heaven resides on mountaintops or in the clouds have been dispelled, and our exploration of the universe so far has not uncovered any evidence of a physical Heaven. The failure to find evidence does not necessarily negate the possibility, but our knowledge about the universe has prompted a change in how most people conceptualize Heaven. Since Heaven is now considered by most to be an ethereal realm unreachable to the living, scientific analyses do not apply and the afterlife must remain a matter of faith.

 

However, some argue that there is tangible evidence of Heaven based on eyewitness accounts of people who've been there during a “near death experience”, or NDE. When evidence is put forth, science is obligated to scrutinize the claim. People surviving a NDE awake with an unshakable feeling that they’ve traveled beyond the confines of their body. You may have heard about the recent case of Alex Malarkey, a young boy who was in an automobile accident in 2004 that left him paralyzed. With the help of his father, they penned a bestselling book in 2010 called, “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven”. But a couple weeks ago, Alex (now 16 years old) admitted that his story was, um, malarkey. Alex now claims that he made up the whole thing as a child because he “thought it would get him attention”. Consequently, the book has been pulled and the million or so people who purchased it are feeling as deflated as a New England Patriots football.

Rock singer Bryan Adams also once thought he'd died and gone to Heaven.

But turns out he was just love-struck.

We are so eager to feast on these personal accounts of an afterlife that a whole new genre of entertainment has been christened “Heavenly Tourism”. Heavenly Tourism is now a big business, even getting a major motion picture in 2014. Some cases appear to bring real credibility to the phenomenon, such as Eben Alexander, M.D., the neurosurgeon who wrote the bestseller “Proof Of Heaven” after his NDE. While science is not a system designed to test matters of faith, researchers can examine what is going on in the brain during NDEs.

“Flatliners” was a movie from 1990 about a group of medical students who tried to reproduce NDEs in the lab. The real miracle is that most of these actors were able to resuscitate their career after this movie.

Dr. Steven Laureys heads a Coma Science Group in Belgium that studies NDEs very seriously. His research is revealing that patients who have a NDE form memories during this period that are unusually vivid, feeling “even more real than real”. Dr. Laureys asserts that the lucid nature of these NDE memories fools many people, including Dr. Eben Alexander, to believe they were real events. But Dr. Laureys attributes these powerful experiences to a dysfunctional brain.

According to Dr. Laureys, there is no evidence that consciousness exists independent of brain activity. In other words, patients forming memories during a NDE were not dead, and the images they retain were the natural result of residual brain activity, which can persist for some time even after the heart stops beating. Further evidence that heavenly visions are not real is that they can be reproduced when certain parts of the brain are artificially stimulated. Oliver Sacks has also written extensively about how the stimulation of certain brain areas can produce an array of transcendental experiences that feel absolutely real. Psychedelic drugs can have a similar impact on the brain.

Supportive findings have emerged from studies that record brain activity in dying rats. In rats that would be considered “clinically dead” by human medical standards, researchers observed a surge in specific brain activities that are signatures of “hyper-consciousness”, the same type of phenomenon that Dr. Laureys observes in patients reporting a vivid NDE. 

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studies the effects that certain religious practices have on the brain, pioneering a new discipline he calls "neurotheology" that aims to identify the biological underpinnings of spirituality. His studies have revealed why NDEs often leave the impression that you traveled down a tunnel towards a bright light. According to Newberg, peripheral vision is lost during a NDE, producing the sensation that one is in a tunnel.
 

The more we study NDEs, the more it becomes clear that there is a neurochemical basis that explains the imagery and sensations. Collectively, these studies raise a red flag about the validity of Heavenly Tourism, so buyer beware. Those offering to be your tour guide may be teaching you more about neurology and psychology rather than what may await us when the brain truly shuts down. Heaven is outside the realm of scientific examination, so the afterlife remains a matter of faith.

It has been posited, however, that our growing scientific knowledge gives less credence to the supernatural, making an afterlife seem highly improbable. Stephen Hawking has proclaimed, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." John Lennon once asked us to image no Heaven. While the thought of a finite existence is unfathomable to many, the truth is that the only existence we can be certain of is the one we are living here and now. Embracing the possibility that life is a one-take movie can inspire us to do wondrous things with the time we have alive. Knowing that we will not be reunited with friends and family in the Great Beyond should prompt us to cultivate better relationships with them now. The logical course of action is to treat our life as a fragile and precious commodity, taking good care of the body and mind and enabling others to do the same, which interestingly agrees with the prime directive of most religions. 

 

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter.

For more information:
 

Thonnard, M., Charland-Verville, V., Brédart, S., Dehon, H., Ledoux, D., Laureys, S., & Vanhaudenhuyse, A. (2013). Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories PLoS ONE, 8 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057620

Borjigin, J., Lee, U., Liu, T., Pal, D., Huff, S., Klarr, D., Sloboda, J., Hernandez, J., Wang, M., & Mashour, G. (2013). Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (35), 14432-14437 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308285110

Newberg AB (2014). The neuroscientific study of spiritual practices. Frontiers in psychology, 5 PMID: 24672504

Blanke, O. (2005). The Out-of-Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction The Neuroscientist, 11 (1), 16-24 DOI: 10.1177/1073858404270885

Physicist Sean Carroll recently gave a lecture that debunks the notion of an afterlife.

Tryptophan vs. The NFL Fan

A turkey dinner with all the fixins can lead to a

satisfying nap. But the meal usually takes a little

longer than this to have an effect. This fellow might

be more affected by last night’s activities than today’s

meal.

Turkey dinner at Thanksgiving brings the family together, celebrates the bountiful harvest, and puts you to sleep just as the NFL games are ready to start. Many people think that if you eat less turkey and fill up on the other goodies you can escape the post-Thanksgiving meal sleepiness. Other people look forward to eating seconds and thirds and then stretching out on the couch for a long nap, forcing Aunt Ethel to sit in the chair with the spring that surprises you every once in a while.

The culprit, or the hero, in this eat and sleep saga is said to be the tryptophan in the turkey. Other people think that it is simply how much you eat, not the turkey's tryptophan, but it isn’t quite that simple. What is tryptophan, and is it indeed responsible for the snoring that follows Thanksgiving dinner?  Some background will help.

Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the twenty standard building blocks of proteins. However, tryptophan is the least abundant amino acid in plant and animal proteins; it accounts for only 1-1.5% of the total number of amino acids in proteins. Tryptophan’s large structure and intricate rings make it costly to produce in terms of ATP invested. In fact, it takes so much energy to make that we have stopped making tryptophan all together. Tryptophan is abundant in a number of food sources commonly available to humans, so over evolutionary time we have turned it into an essential amino acid. True, it is essential for life, but here the word “essential” means that we MUST get it from our diet, we cannot produce it ourselves.

The genetic code is how mRNA codons (3 bases sequences)

get translated into a signal to build proteins from specific amino

acids. The first base of the codon is represented by the biggest

letters (ACGU), the middle base is the middle size letters, while

the third position (wobble position) is usually where you see an

amino acid coded for by more than one codon. For instance,

serine is coded for by UCU, UCC, UCA, or UCG. But tryptophan is

only coded for by UGG. Three codons signal the protein to stop

growing, called stop codons (UAG, UAA, and UGA).

Even though it is used sparingly in proteins, tryptophan is crucial - don’t eat enough of it and you die. This is because tryptophan’s most essential functions have nothing to do with protein synthesis or structure – tryptophan is important to your brain function. The crucial neurotransmitter, serotonin, is synthesized only from tryptophan.

It takes two enzymes to turn tryptophan into serotonin (also called 5-HT).  First is tryptophan hydroxylase; hydroxylase means it splits water, here it adds an OH to tryptophan. Next, the amino acid decarboxylase removes a carboxylic acid (COOH), producing serotonin.

The feeling of general well being induced by serotonin also participates in the sleep/wake cycle. So is tryptophan – through serotonin – responsible for the post-Thanksgiving nap? Well… yes and no, it's an accomplice in a larger conspiracy.

Serotonin is used to produce the hormone melatonin, and melatonin promotes sleep, so you could say turkey dinner promotes sleep. But turkey doesn’t have that much tryptophan! Tofu has much more tryptophan than turkey, but you don’t get a post-Chinese takeout urge to sleep, so what gives?

Melatonin is made from serotonin in the pineal

gland. Sunlight stimulates the suprachiasmatic

nucleus (SCN) which inhibits the pineal from

making melatonin. As the sun goes down,

inhibition is reduced, more melatonin is made

and released from the pineal, and sleep is

promoted.

The melatonin effect has to do more with how much of everything else you eat at Thanksgiving dinner, especially carbohydrates. Here is how it works – eating lots of carbohydrates causes a release of insulin into the blood (to reduced blood glucose levels). Another function of insulin is to promote the uptake of some amino acids (but not tryptophan) into muscle cells. This leaves the blood higher in tryptophan as compared to other amino acids than it would normally be.

The brain takes in amino acids through a neutral amino acid transporter, which now finds more tryptophan than other neutral amino acids, so the brain level of tryptophan goes up. More tryptophan in the brain, more serotonin – more serotonin, more melatonin. More melatonin = nap time! So if you want to avoid the post-Thanksgiving nap, eat the turkey and skip the mashed potatoes.

You didn’t know how much tryptophan controlled your daily life, did you? Well, there’s more. Tryptophan is also important in synthesizing niacin, a.k.a. vitamin B3 or nicotinic acid. Niacin is important in production of NAD/NADH for energy metabolism, for production of steroid hormones and balance of lipid forms in the blood, and as an anti-convulsant.

The tryptophan-niacin connection is made stronger by recent evidence that high dietary tryptophan can prevent epileptic seizures in mice. In this study, a whey protein called alpha-lactoalbumin (ALAC) was found to have much tryptophan, much higher levels than in most proteins. Feeding epileptic mice ALAC resulted in reduced numbers of seizures.

So even if you don’t want to sleep or think happy thoughts, you still need to eat food that contain tryptophan or niacin. And many of those foods are plants, because plants use tryptophan to control their own activities. Tryptophan is easily converted to auxins, a type of plant hormone. Auxins are responsible for several different plant behaviors, namely the falling leaves in autumn and ripe fruits all year long.

Here is an interesting attempt to get kids to read

history. During the spring, captive warriors were

killed by cutting out their hearts, then their skin was

flayed off their body, and the priests would wear them

around for 20 days. This was meant to celebrate the

god who sacrificed himself to allow a new growing

season to begin. This time period corresponds

 to when they would have had the lowest amount of

 tryptophan in their daily diet.

Having dietary choices for tryptophan is good, and plants provide our major source. However, cooking grains and corn reduces usable tryptophan and niacin levels dramatically, so poorer environments where corn is the staple food need also to have additional dietary sources of tryptophan. A deficiency of this amino acid leads to some disturbing conditions. Low tryptophan leads to low serotonin levels and agitation, insomnia, and depression. A study in the Archives of General Psychiatry stated that chronically low levels of tryptophan led to relapses of purging behaviors in bulimics.

More amazingly, studies in the 1970’s to 1990’s suggest that low tryptophan levels can lead to increases in religious fanaticism. Several studies from a single author correlate the Aztec human sacrificial ceremonies to the times of year when their diets depended more on foods that had less tryptophan. Think of all the lives that could have been saved by tofu!


Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules

Russo, E., Scicchitano, F., Citraro, R., Aiello, R., Camastra, C., Mainardi, P., Chimirri, S., Perucca, E., Donato, G., & De Sarro, G. (2012). Protective activity of α-lactoalbumin (ALAC), a whey protein rich in tryptophan, in rodent models of epileptogenesis Neuroscience, 226, 282-288 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2012.09.021
 
Bruce KR, Steiger H, Young SN, Kin NM, Israël M, & Lévesque M (2009). Impact of acute tryptophan depletion on mood and eating-related urges in bulimic and nonbulimic women. Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN, 34 (5), 376-82 PMID: 19721848

Midi-chlorians gave Jedi knights their power. Is there something like this on Earth?

Star Wars Episode VII is happening, to the cautious delight of many longtime fans of the franchise. Replacing George Lucas at the helm is J.J. Abrams, who successfully rebooted the Star Trek franchise.

The cast for Star Wars Episode VII meeting with Yoda J.J. Abrams

Fans are waiting with bated breath to see whether he does a better job than Lucas did with the Star Wars prequels, which caused a great disturbance in the Force. While Jar Jar Binks soured the prequels for most people, one of the other sticking points was the Midi-chlorians. The what? Let's review. In the original series, the Force was described by Obi-Wan Kenobi as "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." In episode I, Qui-Gon Jinn delivered the buzzkill message that the mysterious Force actually had a biological explanation. Instead of saying, “The Force is strong with this one”, one may as well say, “The Midi-chlorians are numerous in this one.”

According to Wookieepedia, “Midi-chlorians were intelligent microscopic life forms that lived symbiotically inside the cells of all living things. When present in sufficient numbers, they could allow their host to detect the pervasive energy field known as the Force.” A collective groan could be felt through movie theatres worldwide, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror…

To a cell biologist, it sounds like Lucas drew his inspiration from the mitochondria, which are bacteria-like symbionts that work with our cells to provide energy. They even look like they might be cousins (see below). But that is where the similarities end. Unlike Midi-chlorians, mitochondria do not allow us to tap into energy fields…no matter how much we try to quiet our minds to hear our mitochondria speak to us.

Midi-chlorian (left) and mitochondria (right). Brothers from another mother?

 

But a strange and provocative paper by Alexander Panchin and colleagues proposes an unorthodox new idea called the “biomeme hypothesis”, which posits that the impulse behind some religious rituals could be driven by mind-altering parasites.

Let that sink in for a moment. Might your religion, or any number of other activities, be driven in part by parasites or symbionts in your brain? Before you dismiss the idea too quickly, think about the rabies virus. This super tiny virus is notorious for altering the behavior of dogs (and other animals, including people). Rabies can make even the most docile of dogs become uncharacteristically aggressive so that they bite and spread the virus. Rabies virus is just the tip of the iceberg; there is no shortage of parasites that are known to eerily alter their host’s behavior.

Rabies makes dogs aggressive to enhance viral transmission. The virus can get into a new host by causing its current host to bite others.

Central to Panchin’s hypothesis is the idea that certain religious rituals may facilitate the transmission and spread of parasites. The authors site that holy springs and holy water are replete with numerous microbes, including human pathogens. Sacred in Hinduism, the Ganges River probably contains the most, as an estimated 200 million liters of untreated human sewage is dumped into it every day. Bathing in this “purifying” water has led to the development of multiple diseases, such as cholera.  The Hindu “side-roll” ritual is associated with Cutaneous Larva Migrans, also known as “creeping eruption of the skin”, which is caused when the skin becomes infected with parasitic hookworm larvae. Performed in Muslim communities, ritual ablution, which involves irrigation of the sinuses, has been proposed to be a potential risk factor in contracting Naegleria fowleri (the infamous “brain-eating amoeba”) in Muslim communities. Outbreaks of respiratory infectious diseases and meningococcal disease are common amongst Hajj congregation in Mecca. The transmission of herpes has been reported in the Jewish circumcision method known as metzitzah, which involves the sucking of blood from the wound. Finally, many sacred relics are kissed or handled by many worshipers, offering additional routes for the potential transmission of multiple infectious agents.

While it is clearly demonstrable that certain religious rituals have inherent health risks, there currently is no direct evidence that any of the possible infections transmitted can influence the victim’s behavior (other than causing them to see a doctor). Until new data arrives, we are left with the conclusion that the rituals people engage in stem from cultural memes rather than biological. But one thing is clear:  you should use some hand sanitizer next time you dip your fingers in the holy water.

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan
Follow Bill on Twitter

 

 

Panchin AY, Tuzhikov AI, & Panchin YV (2014). Midichlorians--the biomeme hypothesis: is there a microbial component to religious rituals? Biology direct, 9 (1) PMID: 24990702