Maybe more than you wanted to read about hearts today

By: | February 14, 2022

Somehow I always knew there was something about my dad’s heart. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, but I did know that he didn’t eat certain things, like eggs and bacon, and ate other things, like canned tuna and low-fat cheese and margarine. (It was the eighties.) He enrolled in a cholesterol study. Bottles of liquid meals appeared in the fridge, all autumn-colored: pale orange and green and brown.

I knew enough—or at least, worried enough—to read the sign at the waterpark where we’d climbed up to the top of the slide. I was small, and scared, but I told him he shouldn’t go down. It wasn’t good for people with heart problems. The heart seemed like a frightening thing, or at least unruly, ready to misbehave at any minute, something that constantly needed watching.

I feel less watchful now, but I do find myself drawn to any information about the heart. To the blue whale, its 400-pound heart as big as a Harley-Davidson, working to its edge. When it dives, it drops its heart rate from around 30 beats per minute to four.  

I find how we talk about the heart fascinating, too. We are disheartened, we have lost heart, and it is hard to go on. The hearts of those we love are sweet. The ones we don’t, or who don’t love us, we call heartless. A different way of being without a heart. There are many creatures that never have a heart at all. The sea cucumbers, the jellies, the sea stars, the flatworms. And then there are the cephalopods, which have three. Two hearts do their work for the gills, the other sends blue blood swooshing to the organs. An octopus’s organ-focused heart even stops while it swims.

Hearts seem like small animals. They leap and flutter and sink. They can be heavy, they can be light. In Etruscan shrews, they can race along at 1,500 beats per minute. The lowest heart rate observed during a blue whale’s dive was two beats per minute.

Beat.

Count slowly to 30.

Beat.

If you think of someone who is all heart, do you imagine them as a four-chambered organ, the size of a fist? Does it surprise you that dogs’ hearts make up a bigger portion of their mass than almost all other animals?

And then there are trees. They have no wet engine, but the central column of wood that supports them is called the duramen, the heartwood. It will not falter if the surrounding layers of living tissue and the bark keep it safe. This heart is at the center of things, even though in most of us it sits slightly to the left. We can transplant hearts back into the body’s soil.

The heart of the matter, the heart of the problem. We get to the heart of it. We steal hearts and we take heart and we wear them on our sleeves. We open our hearts, we close them. Inside, the valves open and close, too, letting blood rush in and rush back out again. Although we have only one, we can lose them again and again. I sometimes imagine hearts scattered about the world like lost socks. Where do they all gather? Is there somewhere that they find each other, scattered in the gutter or clumped at the storm drain? 

Wherever they go, they contain both movement and sound, a marker of time, if time is something that can be marked. The clock before there was a clock. Maybe hearts are time themselves. We don’t know how many heartbeats we have, but there is this one, and this one, and this one. Sometimes they murmur. Sometimes they pound.

It is better, though, if it is not always steady. Better to have a tripping rhythm that speeds up and slows down with every breath. A new type of pacemaker will even listen to the heart and follow its irregular lead, a willing dance partner from tango to foxtrot to TikTok mashup. The heart might march to the beat of its own drum, but when people sing together in groups, their breathing and their heartbeats start to synchronize.

It was my dad’s heart in the end. It stopped, and then it was restarted, but the rest of him never resurfaced alongside it, and then, eventually, it stopped too. It is easy to say it was his heart, because it feels like it’s all of our hearts, always up to something: aching and soaring, growing cold, starting to thaw. A zebrafish can repair its own heart, but to fix our hearts, sometimes we need each other. We need someone whose heart goes out to our lost ones and brings them skipping back home.

*

Image by Wednesday Morning via Flickr/Creative Commons license

Guest Post: Flexible Flying

By: | February 11, 2022

In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine.  Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters.  There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet up one road, and a fiber artist married to a blacksmith down another.  And of course, there is nature.

Our back yard rolls down to a little lake that’s busy with small mouth bass and perch.  The beavers build dens the size of igloos, and on summer evenings the loons kick up a fuss like a pack wet diapered toddlers.   In winter the lake freezes mirror solid, and ice fishers huddle for hours pulling up pickerel to leave like an offering for birds of prey.  

It’s as good a place as any to wait out the plague years.  That’s no secret to aspiring builders who circle like vultures, swooping down with their checkbooks to bid up the price of land.  Still, it’s mostly quiet and just far enough “away” that it’s easy to overlook what’s going on outside our brackish bubble, the closed schools and shuttered businesses, the crowded, frantic hospitals, the airline passengers gone mad with impotent rage. 

Still, we got our shots and boosters, wear masks and worry, especially about the children getting lost in the viral stampede.  What will become of them, we wonder, growing up in a world where grownups bicker over inconvenience and distort medical reality to suit their “truth”? 

Last week we drove to Boston, to see our grandchildren, Avery, a yellow haired girl just turned 4 and Aiden, a brown-haired boy whose second birthday comes in April.  Avery met us at the door dressed in snow pants, mittens and a miniature N95, fully armed for our sledding date.  Aiden was a few steps behind, no mask yet, and his mom still struggling with his boots.   The struggle proved futile, and it was decided Aiden would remain warm and dry at home with his mom. 

Avery selected a few choice snacks from the pantry as I extracted two flying saucers from a tangled heap in the garage.  When all was finally ready, we trudged the half mile or so through the snow to the sliding hill, already thick with tots and pre-teens. Nearly every one of these eager thrill seekers—even the pre-teens—came protected by a guardian who hovered by his or her side at the top of the hill, then scuttled to the bottom to assure a safe landing.  I found this odd: the hill’s vertical drop was no more than 50 feet, and so gradual that some sledders had to push themselves through the last few yards.  That was fine by me:  my granddaughter was on the younger side, and no daredevil. I helped her get settled on the saucer, pointed her in a roughly downhill direction and wished her luck. 

But just before launch time, a guardian leapt into her path, frantically waving and booming “stop.”  We froze.  

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Conversation with Mary-Frances O’Connor on the Grieving Brain

By: | February 9, 2022

Ann Finkbeiner:  My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her.  But I’ve never done any science to find out whether what I know is wrong.  Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor is that kind of expert.  

She’s a psychologist who’s studied what goes on in the human mind, and who’s crossed scientific disciplines to do neuroscience about what goes on in the human brain.  I interviewed Dr. O’Connor a year or so ago and was impressed not only by what she knew about the mind and the brain, but also about the nature of grief itself and its connection to love. Also she listens hard. And she’s written a very readable, thorough, kind book called The Grieving Brain.  

So.  Now.  Dr. O’Connor.  What got you interested in this field of the grieving brain? Because it’s not exactly a field, is it.

Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor: I have been interested for a long time in how we physically encode the world. For grief, I imagined that part of that encoding took place in the brain–when someone is “lost”, how does the brain understand that information? What neural connections change, or epigenetic proteins are added, or do the waves of electrical activity “up there” change their pattern? This seemed like a big enough question that I could spend an entire career on it.

And if I’m also honest, not so much as a scientist but as a person, when my mom died when I was in graduate school, I realized that I could talk to people about death (and therefore grief), and this was pretty unusual. It meant that by engaging other people in such an important part of their lives, my own work felt meaningful, and talking about grief was something that not many people (even psychologists) were willing to do. So studying grief felt like a unique contribution I could make, even though, as you say, grief in the brain wasn’t really a field. Although I hope that is changing.

Ann:  So when you ask how the brain encodes “lost,” you’re asking what happens in the brain when you can’t find the person any more or the person is gone, dead.  And you learned to give brain scans (functional MRI’s, fMRI’s) to find the parts of the brain that are busy as you grieve. But that’s neuroscience and your PhD is in psychology, which is the field that normally studies grief. Almost no one else does that, both psychology and neuroscience, mind and brain both, right?  What did you find?

Mary-Frances: A few of us around the world have studied grief in the mind and brain (Joseph Goveas at Medical College of Wisconsin, Richard Bryant at University of New South Wales, Australia), although I suppose no one else has grief as the sole topic of their neuroscience research. And what I have found in just one study can’t really tell us enough about what the brain is doing during grief and grieving.

Ann: So the question of what the brain does while grieving is a field that’s relatively new and still has no real answers.  But you must have a partial answer, right? 

Mary-Frances: Indeed. One thing is, the parts of the brain important in grief are also involved in reward. We know that reward is important in creating a bond with a loved one, like a partner or a child.   In one of my own neuroimaging studies, those who report the most yearning for their deceased loved one also show the most  activation in the nucleus accumbens–a key node in the brain’s reward network. It’s interesting that there wasn’t a correlation between how “good” or “bad” the bereaved participants felt, but with how much of that yearning motivation they reported.

Ann:  So regardless of how people felt, the more they yearned to see their dead again, the more the brain’s reward system lit up.  That took me a while to understand but I think I do: the feeling of yearning, of wanting someone to please come back please, is run by the same part of the brain that runs rewards, the things that make you feel good.  It’s really nice, isn’t it, that the person you’re missing also made/makes you feel good.  Sad but nice.  So what else does neuroscience say about grief?

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What’s in a (gene) name

By: | February 7, 2022


Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.

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From the Edge of Beringia

By: | February 4, 2022

White Alice site
Archived photo of White Alice site, circa 1950

This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago.

During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a different direction, meant to bounce tropospheric messages from the Russian border to the US. Last used in 1985, the network has been abandoned.

I visited the White Alice site one summer, gathering qivuit, the soft winter fur of muskox, which hangs in branches of overgrown shrub-willow around the radio towers. In low summer light and a stiff mountain breeze from the west, I rubbed qivuit between my fingers. It smelled of earth and musk. I’d run into muskox as I walked up here. They were grazing in the willows, and I startled one as I climbed through the vegetation. Rather, it startled me. I parted branches and found myself about 8 feet from the thick-horned head and a drape of winter fur molting in the willows. The animal looked up, flared two dark, wet nostrils, and went back to grazing. It seemed so unfazed, I snapped off the picture below and backtracked around it. Continue reading →

an ode to my moleskine

By: | February 2, 2022
A letter from Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, which basically sums up half of my journal entries: “But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

The first journal I remember writing in was a black, wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. I was in first grade, and had somehow associated keeping a journal with being mature, so I started to write about what happened to me every day: notable moments in school, who I played with on the weekends. By 3rd grade, I’d upgraded to a pink book with a little brass lock to keep out all the riff-raff. (I had no siblings, and I doubt I wrote anything in there I wouldn’t want my parents to know, besides maybe who I had a crush on, so I’m not sure why I was so concerned about privacy.) You can tell my middle school journals by the colorful gel pens I used, my letters becoming loopier to imitate the cool girls’ handwriting. By high school, I’d filled countless notebooks with my idle musings and doodles. I decorated my journals’ covers with magazine clippings, photos of my friends, inside jokes. I carried them everywhere, furiously scribbling in them during study hall, chemistry, French class.

Then, the internet happened. I set up shop on LiveJournal, then DeadJournal, and a little-known LiveJournal clone called Caleida. For the first time, I wasn’t just writing for myself; I was writing to an audience. Mostly, my readers were friends from school or summer camp, but I ended up making some friends on the site who I still only know from the LJ era. LiveJournal died; we all moved on to Tumblr. I made friends there, too, some of whom are now professional writers. Somewhere along the way, I stopped journaling for me, and started writing words for a living.

I didn’t think anything of it until I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. A younger me would’ve sworn it off as too woo-woo, not “evidence-based,” but in the middle of a creative rut, I followed her advice more carefully than any physical regimen I’d ever been prescribed. (Sorry, physical therapists: I almost never follow through on doing the preventative exercises I know will be good for me.) I took myself on artist’s dates to the bookshop and to the bay, and I allowed myself the joy of scooping up a monkey puzzle tree branch to sit in my office, just for the fun of it. Perhaps most importantly, I started doing Cameron’s vaunted “morning pages.” For the uninitiated, this is just journaling, but with a few rules: it must be first thing, it must be longhand, and it does not have to be good.

I am here to sing the praises of the morning pages. There are studies, I know, of why this is an effective practice, but I offer you no statistics, and no guarantees. All I know is that now that I’ve returned to journalling, I am kicking myself for abandoning it for so many years. It feels like those will be the “dark years,” full of stray thoughts and fleeting moments forgotten, unless I happened to take a photo of what was going on at the time. The ability to go back and read what I’ve written in past years is so calming, now that I know how everything turned out: it was all fine. And the routine of writing each morning with the same pen in the same corner with the same mug of coffee adds a comforting predictability to my day, a place I know I can process whatever happened yesterday, or in my dreams. I can sort out the detritus floating around in my head before I sit down and try to do anything, and I can get to the root of what is really bugging me by writing brutal, ugly words I know (or at least hope) no one will read but me — and I will always understand.

The Artifice of Mondays

By: | January 31, 2022

I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling stars and unknown planets, Mondays do not exist.

I don’t like Mondays because when I was a kid they meant I had to set down my lunchbox full of rocks. Ditches and vacant, weedy lots were replaced with plastic chairs on metal legs and having to listen to the tick tock rhythms of civilization, what wars were fought, what is seven divided by eleven.

I’m not a great learner, got good enough grades, but I wanted to be outside, or anywhere but learning to count hours, standing in line with people I didn’t care about while desperately trying to find the ones I did. Which is why I don’t like Mondays. You have go back to it.

The seven-day pattern we’ve invented has, of course, effected our psychology. A study published in the Public Library of Science found that the fastest a participant could remember the day of the week was Monday, and not because it’s a pleasant thought. The study of 1,115 people (mostly 21-40 years old, about the same women as men, mostly UK, most of the rest US),  looked at “the semantic and affective character of weekdays,” their emphasis. Days of the week each have their own personalities. Monday is ranked lowest in ‘pleasure,’ lowest in ‘arousal,’ and highest in ‘dominance.’

For me, it was the clock on the wall and the classroom door closing with a loud clicking, windows shut tight, if there were windows at all. In the mid 70s, I was bused to the inner-city and what I remember is big, old trees growing outside the school, and in the spring a girl and I sat on nests we made at their bases, and we flew together like birds. Anything outside the box was good. You could move your arms around, and imagination opened wide and soared.

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Lost Lake

By: | January 28, 2022

Long ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I was charged with teaching a class of first-year students how to write “academically.” (Poor things.) One essay I chose for them from the beefy course reader was “The Loss of the Creature,” by the novelist Walker Percy. Briefly, Percy argues that we have lost our ability to see the essence of things. So many of our experiences come to us thoroughly pre-packaged that we gauge our pleasure by the degree to which the experience aligns with our expectations. “[T]he thing as it is,” he writes, “has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.”

I was thinking of Percy and his discontents a few weeks ago while I drove on I-90 through eastern Washington with my wife, daughter, and mother-in-law. It was the start of my daughter’s winter break and we were off to Yellowstone National Park. I don’t go out of my way to visit national parks, but my daughter is in fourth grade and the National Park Service, taking a sort of “Give Me the Child and I Will Show You the Man” approach to wilderness appreciation, offers free admission for fourth graders. So to Yellowstone we were bound.

To make the trip an occasion we had rented a van that had more names than a member of the British royal family: a Mercedes Sprinter Storyteller Overlander BeastMODE 4×4. Its owners had shortened that to Serenity, which they stenciled on the side above some Chinese characters. Serenity was a stew of semiotic psychoses. Here we were, cosseted in an exemplar of wild, carefree, adventure-loving, planet-hugging #VanLife, all to the tune of fifteen miles per gallon. I spent a lot of the drive calculating the veritable forests we’d have to plant to offset the effects of this monstrosity. In the end I figured that, as middle-class Americans, if we truly wanted to lessen our impact on the planet, then the surest way to do that, sensu Camus, would be to kill ourselves. But it was the holidays, and we were leaving the Cascadia bioregion for the first time in two years, en route to one of the country’s most stunning national parks, and so I resolved to think happy thoughts.

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