There are small rocks in your ears that keep you balanced
Plus, the man who could not lie. Why collagen supplements don't work. Why we change more than we admit. And woolly mammoths.
Hello!
I want to first take this opportunity to wish you and your family a happy Diwali from mine. May you find the way to light through your metaphorical darkness.
I have a couple of things in the hopper that are not ready to share yet time tie in to my latest obsession— heath, ageing (and longevity), and gut microbes. I have read a few hundred articles on these topics and have a lot to say, but am figuring out the best approach.
This week, insteadt, I thought I’d do a short digest of a few interesting things. Perhaps, you too may find some of these useful. The headline story this week is the climate change summit in Glasgow, but I’m going to keep this newsletter focussed on other topics. :)
Here’s something, for example, you might not know.
Inside each ear, you have a pouch with around a thousand small rocks made of calcium carbonate.
These tiny rocks help keep stay balanced. When they're loose you might feel dizzy.
Ear rocks are part of an elaborate motion-sensing matrix coordinated by the brain. But in earquakes, these rocks can fall into one of the inner ear canals and roll around. The brain perceives it as the head moving around a lot and you get vertigo. Around 20% of the cases of vertigo are due to these ear rocks falling out. Risk factors include infections, age, and head injury.
The normal way to fix this is to move your head around in an elaborate set of maneuvers (called the Epley maneuver). This is kind of like trying to get a small metal ball into the hole at the center of a maze-toy. But it might not work if you have too many loose rocks.
Dizziness that results from loose ear rocks is called benign paraoxysmal positional vertigo. It can happen suddenly and keep you from your normal activities. It can last seconds, days, weeks, or months. There’s a great deal of information on these ear rocks at the Cleveland Clinic.
The man who could not lie.
Here’s an incredibly interesting case from the annals of medical literature.
A 51-year-old man had a rare condition that made it impossible for him to perform his duties as a European bureaucrat. He was incapable of lying. When he tried to lie, he convulsed and lost consciousness, thereby losing his fibbing gambit to his political adversaries.
There had never been a documented case of lying triggering epileptic seizures in the medical literature.
In 1993, doctors at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg in France dubbed the condition "Pinocchio syndrome".
Pinocchio, who was a high-level European bureaucrat, continued to suffer the effects of his inability to lie-- both personally and career-wise. The breakthrough came when doctors discovered a tumor about the size of a walnut.
The tumor was increasing excitability and causing a part of the brain called the amygdala to trigger seizures. Once the tumor was removed, the convulsions and loss of consciousness ceased. The bureaucrat was able to perform his duties to the best of his ability again.
Why collagen supplements don’t work.
Imagine that all the paragraphs in the world consist of the same 20 words. The paragraphs are proteins and the words are amino acids. Your body cuts out each word from all the paragraphs— and here’s the important part— it writes its own sentences and paragraphs.
This is why taking a collagen supplement is not going to make your skin look better. The collagen you swallow will get broken up in your gut into its individual amino acids, before it gets into your bloodstream. It’s like all other proteins that way.
We don’t think we are changing. But we always are.
Today I found something I had written ten years ago about leaving home. I have changed a lot from that former me who wrote about changing a lot.
Will I change in the future? If you ask me, I’ll probably say “not a lot”. But I’m not alone. This ties in to a psychological idea called The End of History Illusion.
This idea was first published in Science about a decade ago (and is named after Francis Fukuyama's book). Here’s the gist of it—
People of all ages believe that they've undergone major changes in the past, but are stable and won't change much in the future.
The amusing bit here is that it applies to people at any age. We feel that the present is a watershed moment. We feel we have grown significantly over time (such as in the past decade) but are stable now and not much will change. We think we know exactly who we are.
Researchers believe this illusion applies more to cultures that foster a sense of independence than to those that believe in the wisdom of the collective. If you've been on Twitter ten years, you can look at how sure you were back then and bookmark tweets today for “future you” to mock.
Should we bring back woolly mammoths?
This is the topic of my most recent Hindustan Times column.
First, we need to get things clear. All this fuss about woolly mammoth revival isn’t exactly accurate. The company that is attempting this isn't even really reintroducing a woolly mammoth. It's plan is to create a cold-adapted chimaera that is really an elephant with some woolly mammoth genes.
This genetically modified elephant-mammoth hybrid will be implanted into a female elephant surrogate, which will give birth to offspring with certain genes for cold adaptation from mammoths. But because there are around 1.4 million differences in the genomes of Asian elephants and mammoths, the engineered animals that will be created will not be mammoths. They will still be elephants.
No one knows how healthy this elephant will be or how long it will survive.
Megaherbivores are keystone species that can help save habitats. But why try to introduce one that died out 4,000 years ago when we do a lousy job of protecting Asian and African elephants are alive today and need our conservation efforts?
We have limited resources to save a few of the million species that currently on the verge of extinction. As I argue in my piece—
To be clear, I’m not opposed to de-extinction, but there should be well-defined objectives. De-extinction should not create a moral hazard problem providing a consequence-free excuse to continue destroying habitats and warming the planet. The primary goal should be to save species that exist right now or have become extinct in the last few years. Such species should be introduced only after robust public discussion. Candidate species could include the Balinese tiger or the northern white rhinoceros.
The crux of the matter is this. For each species to exist on the planet, there needs to be a conducive environment. The goal of de-extinction should not be to create a Jurassic Park type zoo, but to reintroduce an organism that has a real shot at thriving in a sustainable habitat. If such a habitat does not exist, then we will only briefly introduce species that become extinct again.
Final thoughts…
Thanks to Dr. Parija for spotting my book at the airport in Kolkata. Because of the pandemic, I’ve not been on a plane in nearly two years. Hopefully, my book will still be on shelves when I travel. You know what to do to make it happen (hint, hint). ;)
Happy Diwali to you and your family.