Overweening Generalist

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Updates and Re-Takes On Some Old Posts: Toxo, Hot Peppers and Boredom

A. Toxoplasmosis 
I had written a bit on Toxoplasmosis gondii  HERE. This is a weird microbe that infects around 11% of Unistatians and other countries have a much higher infection rate. If infected by this parasite, most people's immune systems keep it in check; for others it appears to get into the brain, cause cysts there (Ew!), and very weird stuff: it makes women more aggressive; men become more impulsive and less fearful when they probably should be cautious. One way we get it is via contact with domesticated cat feces. It rarely kills anyone; it simply makes them act strangely.

Right after I wrote about it, another study came out. (Secondhand HERE.) Its lead author, E.Fuller Torrey, thinks cats should be seen as more dangerous than most of us think they are. Having a cat around in your childhood might lead to schizophrenia or other mental illness in adulthood, their study suggests.

Sidelight: Interestingly to sombunall readers of this blog, Dr. Torrey published a book on Ezra Pound in 1984; I've read it: Torrey thinks Pound and his pals in high places got away with pulling a fast one on the Unistat gummint: Pound was found, basically, insane for broadcasting his at-times vile antisemitic thoughts over the radio with Mussolini's imprimatur, and therefore Pound avoided a death sentence for treason.

Adding to this bizarre infection, a study in France sought to understand the possible evolutionary aspect of Toxo. Some chimps were infected with it, and urine from a leopard didn't scare them away like it should have. Today, mice and rats infected with Toxo aren't afraid of domesticated cats like they ought to be, for their own survival. I also learned that lions and tigers are not predators of chimps, but leopards are. I will never become a zoologist at this point...

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky is fascinated by the Toxo research, while his equally brilliant colleague at Stanford's rival, U. of California at Berkeley, Michael B. Eisen, said this study is interesting, but the chimps' sense of smell could be set off by factors other than their Toxo infection.

So: Toxo may have jumped from being incubated in the guts of a Big Cat, to domesticated cats circa 15,000 years ago. But I don't see the evolutionary Big Picture of Toxo, other than it's doing what it's got to do to keep going generation after generation, like viruses. It makes some of us act really weird, and humans in our pre-history who ended up being eaten by big cats? They're not any of our ancestors. I'd like to hear an Intelligent Design person explain this one.

B. On Hot Peppers
Three and a half years ago I blogged about, among other things, my love for very hot peppers, and how I might have hallucinated in a Thai restaurant near Berkeley due to an extreme hot pepper event. I still chase after the buzz, and the quest to develop the hottest peppers in the world continues unabated.

Recently I ran across a fascinating article by a Berkeley writer (who I only know by name), Andrew Leonard. "Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food: How the Chili Pepper Got To China."

Now, I consider Nautilus one of the best online magazines, but the comments for this article were, I thought, really horrid. So many fine points made by Leonard missed! (Also: Leonard invites semantic reaction by asserting that "revolutionaries" like really hot peppers, when he really only makes a strong case for those Chinese coming out of Sichuan Province.) Was George Washington a lover of hot peppers? Doing the research: no. Karl Marx? Probably not. Che? He appears to have liked spicy food, but he didn't make a huge deal out of it. One of the highlights of Leonard's piece is the story of how former German schoolteacher Otto Braun, turned Soviet counter-espionage agent, was sent to advise Mao, and couldn't get used to the very spicy food, and Mao is quoted, "The food of the true revolutionary is red pepper."

U. of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin had long been interested in why some people really love hot, spicy foods and peppers. Why do peppers seem "hot" when they aren't? Because capsaicin activates pain receptors (called TRPV1) for actual hot things. It's a delightful glitch, methinks. Rozin thought people attracted to hot peppers and who enjoy the taste and the pain must be the same sorts of people who are thrill-seekers, chance-takers...maybe even revolutionaries? Mao thought the pepper-lover is ready to fight and win; Rozin later coined the term "benign masochism" for pepper-lovers.

(So who are the malignant masochists? Poor Trump supporters?)

Decades after Rozin's guesses about hot pepper-lovers, research has validated his ideas. A Penn.State study showed a significant correlation between "sensation seeking" and love for hot peppers. (Italics mine to remind you it's tentative.)

Leonard goes into the history of Sichuan Province: where, about 250 years after Columbus, hot peppers made their way and grew easily and cheaply and preserved themselves for long periods and added flavor to dishes, vitamins B and C, and were antibacterial to boot.

The history of Sichuan and its de-population in the 16th century due to banditry, famine and rebellions, followed by an influx of 1.7 million the next century (fall of the Ming, rise of the Qing) is one Leonard tries to tie with the hot and humid province, the ying/yang medicinal philosophy, the cheapness of raising hot peppers there, and risk-taking personalities on the move due to internal strife. Because these hardy souls lived through tough times and migrated to Sichuan from other parts of China, the idea is that revolutionary personalities are prevalent there. And hey, I dig a spicy-food-loving lady too. But the neurobiological research so far shows that these pepper-lovers may just be more thrill-seeking; I think political revolutionary is a mere sub-type. Still, read the article, 'cuz it's pretty good if you're into that sorta thing.

It seems people are probably not born with a penchant for spicy hot peppers, and need to become habituated. I think I habituated myself, and it could be because I'm what Linda Bartoshuk calls a "nontaster": the number of fungiform papillae on my tongue make me like my coffee black and strong, my beer very hoppy and bitter, my peppers really hot, etc. However, I have never considered myself a thrill-seeker in the ordinary sense of the term. I do seek novelty...

C. On Boredom
I assayed some aspects - mostly my subjectivity - toward boredom HERE. With the availability heuristic - or is it more like "priming"? - once I've written on some topic, that topic suddenly appears everywhere.

A book called Unbored came to my attention. Although it's for younger people, I saw a lot of my own thinking on the topic reflected there. In delving into Robert Anton Wilson's Sex, Drugs and Magick, looking for a reference about something else, I happened to re-read a part of RAW's discussion of Aleister Crowley's book Diary of a Drug Fiend:

In the third, and most controversial part of the book, "Purgatorio", Peter and Lou attempt a cure under the auspices of a mysterious magician named King Lamus - a thinly disguised portrait of Crowley himself. At the Abbey of Thelema (based on an actual religious retreat once run by Crowley in Sicily), Peter and Lou are put in a situation where all the cocaine and heroin they could possibly want is immediately and easily available to them. King Lamus tells them, using Crowley's favorite slogan, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

There is a gimmick, of course. In fact, there are several gimmicks. The abbey, although hardly as austere as a Christian monastery, is quite isolated from civilization; Peter and Lou are soon confronted with the most underrated but powerful force in the world - boredom. There are no movies, nightclubs, or other distractions. When they complain, King Lamus tells them again, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." They soon discover that, in spite of their hedonistic existence, they have never actually done their "will" in a profound sense, but have only followed momentary whims. Isolated at the abbey, they are forced to ask themselves, again and again, what they truly do "will" for their subsequent lives.

Take a few moments to ponder this?

Boredom is being tackled by neuroscientists: if you've ever been tackled by a neuroscientist, you know what I mean. But I jest. Scientist Bill Greisar says of boredom that it's so pervasive it "suggests it serves some critical role in behavior." Which I think Crowley - a more interesting psychologist to my eyes - saw in the early part of the century. In one of many articles on boredom studies, Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage comes up, as does Dickens, and the idea of one thinker that boredom is a milder form of disgust, which took me some time to "see." (Right now, I've gone back to not "seeing" much of a relationship between Boredom and Disgust, and I'm afraid it simply was never meant to be. I'd like to fix up Boredom with Anger...)

Many studies have shown that boring activities lead to more creativity, even boring reading activities. ("In some circumstances" was the caveat from one researcher.)

In a creative activity bored subjects performed better than distressed, elated and relaxed subjects. (I wonder how they provoked elation?) The physiology of boredom is interesting: you're more stressed (cortisol in bloodstream), with an increased heart rate, unmotivated by your surroundings, and have a difficult time sustaining attention.

What could be the purpose of boredom? A Texas A&M study suggests boredom is something like hunger or thirst: it motivates you to change your immediate circumstances. You seek novelty, new goals and situations. "By motivating desire for change from the current state, boredom increases opportunities to attain social, cognitive, emotional and experiential stimulation that could have been missed." Anticipation of a change in mental state is associated with our old pal Dopamine.

Philosopher Andreas Elpidorou says boredom is essential for a decent life and life without it would be a nightmare.

Around the same time, I stumbled upon the idea that, how can we still be bored in the 21st century? The idea is that too much stimulation is boring.

Since my initial blog on boredom, I've become convinced that I do get bored. It's probably not true of my assertion that I'm never bored. It's a matter of degree, which reduces to the felt amount of time bored, which for me isn't much. Id est: my moments of boredom are so brief, I don't frame them as "me being bored." I simply move on to the next thing. And there are endlessly interesting things of easy avail to me. Perhaps I'm some sort of intelligent simpleton?

I consider my lifetime love of reading here paramount. How many departures from my paramount "reality" are available to me in books? It's endless. It's good for a reliable squirt of dopamine into my brain-pan.

Not long ago I read a wonderful novella by Anton Chekhov, The Story of a Nobody, from around 1893. The description of the main male antagonist's friend, a logical man named Pekarasky, who can multiply two three-digit numbers in his head immediately, has railway and finance tables memorized, can convert currencies mentally and accurately:

But for this extraordinary intelligence many things that even a stupid man knows were quite incomprehensible. Thus he could not understand at all why it is that people get bored, cry, shoot themselves and even kill others, why they worry about things and events that do not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Saltykov-Schedrin. 

Is this not a creepy guy, this Pekarsky? Doesn't something about him seem vaguely monstrous to you?

Walker Pearcy's theory of hurricanes seems to fit in here nicely. Malaise and despair and world-weariness can be fixed by a you-must-act-now situation, which is the hurricane. My view is that we need to pay attention and develop a mental "patch" so that it doesn't require a hurricane or car accident in order to make our interiorities vital again.

                                           kunst: Mr. Bob Campbell


tony smyth said...

Hunan also has very spicy food, I believe cos its mountainous and often cold. Not many Chinsese left that area which is why there arent many Hunan restaurants abroad. But there is one in SF, up in Chinatown. At one point long ago it was voted the best restaurant in the US. So if you like spicy food and havent discovered it yet ... recommended. [but I'll bet you know about this : )]

Eric Wagner said...

Perhaps some people respond to boredom by becoming angry. Great piece, as usual. I have included five Chekhov plays in two of my classes this semester. I haven't read Ed Sanders' book on Chekhov.

michael said...


In Leonard's article he discusses the period in Sichuan between the 16th and 18th centuries and depopulation and re-population of Sichuan: lots of migration from Hunan and Hubei to Sichaun then; presumably the newcomers developed the taste for really spicy peppers there.

I've had very spicy Chinese in Chinatown, but I'll to check which place you're referring to. IIRC RAW's favorite place was Empress of China, which closed after 48 yrs in biz.

@Eric- It seems reasonable that some people respond to boredom with anger. One of the deeper inferences I get from boredom theory is it pushes us to some other mental state. If boredom is also processed as "frustration" I can see anger coming from that.

A lot of the boredom stuff, if seems to me, suffers from map/territory problems: we have words for mostly invisible mental states; presumably these states can be "mapped" via various neural imaging gizmos and compared from person to person. The word is not the mental state. I really have no way of talking to someone who says they're bored and I am too: that this is "the same" in both of us. Pragmatically and wisely, we assume we're in the same boat and let's do something to get out of it.

I really liked the Sanders book on Chekhov; you get some great history of 19th c. Russia there and he does great research and the whole book is based in verse.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...


In the book I recommended to you, 'The Core of the Sun" by Johanna Sinisalo, the hot pepper lover is also a revolutionary. And the alternative Finland in the novel bans peppers, along with banning caffeine, recreational drugs and alcohol.

I love Sichuan Chinese food; a lot of the food I make at home is Sichuan style. There are certain hot sauces and peppers needed for it that you can only get in a Chinese grocery; you won't find much of what you need next to the soy sauce at the local supermarket.

Charlie said...

Here is one we have much in common; love of hot spicy food, bitter beer, dark coffee. In addition, I can't recall when I may have last thought I was 'bored'. I'm guessing 15 years or more. I have attributed the trait of boredom with those whom do not have many (or any) hobbies. I have so much to keep myself occupied with that I don't get nearly ENOUGH time for my favorite hobbies; i.e. guitar and music in general.
Suffice to say, I'm glad I fully tracked with you here!

michael said...

These things track compellingly well when gene pools are studied, as I've written about elsewhere here at the OG and in other spots.

The "Einstein of Taste Perception," Linda Bartoshuk, says the number of fungiform papillae on tongues- which has A LOT to do with taste perception - can be traced sorta like gene migrations. White males in the West Coast of Unistat seem to REALLY like bitter, strong, "radically spicy" foods. It may be more genetic than your own "choice," is one way of framing this.

I agree with you: I NEVER feel palpably "bored." The evidence that I probably do experience it, if only of short duration, seems reasonable to me, as of this date.