The coronavirus has spread out of China, into South Korea, Japan and now Italy. We’re settling into the reality that we’re likely facing a pandemic. It’s time to educate ourselves–to take some free courses on COVID-19.
In response to the outbreak, Imperial College London has put together a free course (offered through Coursera) called “Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19.” The course will teach you the “science underpinning the novel Coronavirus outbreak,” so that you can understand “how the spread of the epidemic is modeled, how transmissibility of infections is estimated, what the challenges are in estimating the case fatality ratio, and also … the importance of community involvement in responding to the epidemic.” You can get started with this courseright now.
Alternatively you can sign up for COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus. Created by FutureLearn and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this course looks at “how COVID-19 emerged, was identified and spreads, the public health measures for the virus worldwide, and what is needed to address COVID-19 and prevent it [from] spreading.” Although the course is now open for enrollment, it won’t officially start until March 22.
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Johns Hopkins has created an interactive website that tracks the spread of the coronavirus around the globe. The site is updated daily, if not several times per day. And it shows the number of confirmed coronavirus cases around the globe (along with the precise location on a map), the number of people who have recovered from the virus, and the total number who have perished. With the report today that Italy has seen coronavirus spike from 3 cases, to 132230, in a matter of days, it does look like coronavirus is taking on a more global dimension. That’s all reflected on the Johns Hopkins site, whose data is drawn from the WHO, CDC, ECDC, NHC and DXY. You can read more about the interactive website at The Lancet.
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The techno-futurist prophets of the late 20th century, from J.G. Ballard to William Gibson to Donna Haraway, were right, it turns out, about the intimate physical unions we would form with our machines. Haraway, professor emeritus of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, proclaimed herself a cyborg back in 1985. Whether readers took her ideas as metaphor or proleptic social and scientific fact hardly matters in hindsight. Her voice was predictive of the everyday biometrics and mechanics that lay just around the bend.
It can seem we are a long way, culturally, from the decade when Haraway’s work became required reading in “undergraduate curriculum at countless universities.” But as Hari Kunzru wrote in 1997, “in terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the ‘world’ to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era.” Three decades later, networked implants that automate medical data tracking and analysis and regulate dosages have become big business, and millions feed their vitals daily into fitness trackers and mobile devices and upload them to servers worldwide.
So, fine, we are all cyborgs now, but the usual use of that word tends to put us in mind of a more dramatic melding of human and machine. Here too, we find the cyborg has arrived, in the form of prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by the brain. Psychologist, DJ, and electronic musician Bertolt Meyer has such a prosthesis, as he demonstrates in the video above. Born without a lower left arm, he received a robotic replacement that he can move by sending signals to the muscles that would control a natural limb. He can rotate his hand 360 degrees and use it for all sorts of tasks.
Problem is, the technology has not quite caught up with Meyer’s need for speed and precision in manipulating the tiny controls of his modular synthesizers. So Meyer, his artist husband Daniel, and synth builder Chrisi of KOMA Elektronik set to work on bypassing manual control altogether, with a prosthetic device that attaches to Meyer’s arm where the hand would be, and works as a controller for his synthesizer. He can change parameters using “the signals from my body that normally control the hand,” he writes on his YouTube page. “For me, this feels like controlling the synth with my thoughts.”
Meyer walks us through the process of building his first prototypes in an Inspector Gadget-meets-Kraftwerk display of analogue ingenuity. We might find ourselves wondering: if a handful of musicians, artists, and audio engineers can turn a prosthetic robotic arm into a modular synth controller that transmits brainwaves, what kind of cybernetic enhancements—musical and otherwise—might be coming soon from major research laboratories?
Whatever the state of cyborg technology outside Meyer’s garage, his brilliant invention shows us one thing: the human organism can adapt to being plugged into the unlikeliest of machines. Showing us how he uses the SynLimb to control a filter in one of his synthesizer banks, Meyer says, “I don’t even have to think about it. I just do it. It’s zero effort because I’m so used to producing this muscle signal.”
Advancements in biomechanical technology have given disabled individuals a significant amount of restored function. And as generally happens with major upgrades to accessibility devices, they also show us how we might all become even more closely integrated with machines in the near future.
Back in 2009, the musician who goes by the name “Cheesy Nirvosa” began experimenting with ambient music, before eventually launching a YouTube channel where he “composes longform space and scifi ambience.” Or what he otherwise calls “ambient geek sleep aids.” Click on the video above, and you can get lulled to sleep listening to the ambient droning sound–get ready Blade Runner fans!– heard in Rich Deckard’s apartment. It runs a good continuous 12 hours.
You’re more a Star Trek fan? Ok, try nodding off to the idling engine noise of a ship featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mr. Nirvosa cleaned up a sample from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. That makes for one long sleep.
Or how about 12 hours of ambient engine noise generated by the USCSS Nostromo in Alien?
Finally, and perhaps my favorite, Cheesy created a 12 hour clip of the ambient sounds made by the Tardis, the time machine made famous by the British sci-fi TV show, Doctor Who. But watch out. You might wake up living in a different time and place.
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Above, The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, answers basic questions you might have about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.
What are the symptoms? Where have cases been confirmed so far? How is the virus transmitted? What are the available treatments? Should I be panicking? and more…
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I always champion anything that will improve the lives of people with disabilities and put it on the front burner. — Itzhak Perlman
At its best, the Internet expands our horizons, introducing us to new interests and perspectives, forging connections and creating empathy.
The educational children’s series Sesame Street was doing all that decades earlier.
Witness this brief clip from 1981, starring violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman and a six-year-old student from the Manhattan School of Music.
For many child—and perhaps adult—viewers, this excerpt presented their first significant encounter with classical musical and/or disability.
The little girl scampers up the steps to the stage as Perlman, who relies on crutches and a motorized scooter to get around, follows behind, heaving a sigh of relief as he lowers himself into his seat.
Already the point has been made that what is easy to the point of unconsciousness for some presents a challenge for others.
Then each takes a turn on their violin.
Perlman’s skills are, of course, unparalleled, and the young girl’s seem pretty exceptional, too, particularly to those of us who never managed to get the hang of an instrument. (She began lessons at 3, and told the Suzuki Association of the Americas that her Sesame Street appearance with Perlman was the “highlight of [her] professional career.”)
In the nearly 40 years since this episode first aired, public awareness of disability and accessibility has become more nuanced, a development Perlman discussed in a 2014 interview with the Wall Street Journal, below.
Having resented the way early features about him invariably showcased his disability, he found that he missed the opportunity to advocate for others when mentions dropped off.
Transparency coupled with celebrity provides him with a mighty platform. Here he is speaking in the East Room of the White House in 2015, on the day that President Obama honored him with the Medal of Freedom:
After his dismissal from Harvard for researching LSD with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert left the U.S. for India in 1967. He devoted himself to the teachings of Hindu teacher Neem Karoli Baba and returned to the States a permanently changed man, with a new name and a message he first spread via the collaboratively-edited and illustrated 1971 classic Be Here Now.
In the “philosophically misty, stubbornly resonant Buddhist-Hindu-Christian mash-up,” writes David Marchese at The New York Times, Ram Dass “extolled the now-commonplace, then-novel (to Western hippies, at least) idea that paying deep attention to the present moment—that is, mindfulness—is the best path to a meaningful life.” We’ve grown so used to hearing this by now that we’ve likely become a little numb to it, even if we’ve bought into the premise and the practice of meditation.
Ram Dass discovered that mindful awareness was not part of any self-improvement project but a way of being ordinary and abandoning excess self-concern. “The more your awareness is expanded, the more it becomes just a natural part of your life, like eating or sleeping or going to the toilet” he says in the excerpt above from a talk he gave on “Conscious Aging” in 1992. “If you’re full of ego, if you’re full of yourself, you’re doing it out of righteousness to prove you’re a good person.”
To really open ourselves up to reality, we must be willing to put desire aside and become “irrelevant.” That’s a tough ask in a culture that values few things more highly than fame, youth, and beauty and fears nothing more than aging, loss, and death. Our culture “denigrates non-youth,” Ram Dass wrote in 2017, and thus stigmatizes and ignores a natural process everyone must all endure if they live long enough.
[W]hat I realized many years ago was I went into training to be a kind of elder, or social philosopher, or find a role that would be comfortable as I became irrelevant in the youth market. Now I’ve seen in interviewing old people that the minute you cling to something that was a moment ago, you suffer. You suffer when you have your face lifted to be who you wish you were then, for a little longer, because you know it’s temporary.
The minute you pit yourself against nature, the minute you pit yourself with your mind against change, you are asking for suffering.
Older adults are projected to outnumber children in the next decade or so, with a healthcare system designed to extract maximum profit for the minimal amount of care. The denial of aging and death creates “a very cruel culture,” Ram Dass writes, “and the bizarre situation is that as the demographic changes, and the baby boomers come along and get old, what you have is an aging society and a youth mythology”—a recipe for mass suffering if there ever was one.
We can and should, Ram Dass believed, advocate for better social policy. But to change our collective approach to aging and death, we must also, individually, confront our own fears of mortality, no matter how old we are at the moment. The spiritual teacher and writer, who passed away yesterday at age 88, confronted death for decades and helped students do the same with books like 2001’s Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying and his series of talks on “Conscious Aging,” which you can hear in full further up.
“Recorded at the Conscious Aging conference sponsored by the Omega Institute in 1992,” notes the Ram Dass Love Serve Remember Foundation, the conference “was the first of its kind on aging. Ram Dass had just turned sixty.” He begins his first talk with a joke about purchasing his first senior citizen ticket and says he felt like a teenager until he hit fifty. But joking aside, he learned early that really living in the present means facing aging and death in all its forms.
I tend to be somewhat skeptical of scientific research that focuses solely on what practices like meditation do to the greyish-pinkish-white stuff inside our skulls. Humans are too complex to be treated like brains in vats. Holistic disciplines like meditation and yoga emphasize the union of mind and body, and neuroscientists have shown how mental and emotional health is as tied to the functioning of our circulatory systems and microbiomes as it is to proper brain function.
On the other hand, there’s no denying the importance of brain health, given that it’s the one organ we may never be able to replace. While we may have grown accustomed to, and maybe even weary of, seeing mindfulness under the scanner, the neuroscience of yoga hasn’t received nearly as much press. This is changing for several reasons. Most prominently, “yoga has particularly gained traction as a research area of interest in its promising potential of therapy to combat the alarming increase in age-related neurogenerative diseases.”
The survey authors define yoga as “the most popular form of complementary therapy practiced by more than 13 million adults,” as well as an ancient practice that “dates back over 2000 years to ancient India.” Whether one does yoga in more spiritual or more secular contexts, its “acute and intervention effects on cognition are evident” across the entire range of studies. The research confirms much of what we might expect—yoga has a positive effect on mood, demonstrating “the potential to improve anxiety, depression, stress and overall mental health.”
The survey also showed consistent findings we might not have expected. Despite the typically slow pace of a Hatha yoga routine, all the studies found evidence that “yoga enhances many of the same brain structures and functions that benefit from aerobic exercise,” as Science Daily points out. “From these 11 studies, we identified some brain regions that consistently come up, and they are surprisingly not very different from what we see with exercise research,” says lead author Neha Gotha, kinesiology and community health professor at the University of Illinois.
Gotha identifies one of those benefits as an increase in the size of the hippocampus, the region of the brain that tends to shrink with age and “the structure that is first affected in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.” Other regions affected include the amygdala, which contributes to emotional regulation, and the prefrontal cortex, which is “essential to planning, decision-making, multitasking, thinking about your options and picking the right option,” says study co-author Jessica Damoiseaux, psychology professor at Wayne State University.
“Yoga is not aerobic in nature,” says Gotha, “so there must be other mechanisms leading to these brain changes. So far we don’t have the evidence to identify what those mechanisms are.” The effects, however, aren’t only similar to those of more vigorous exercise; in some cases, yoga seemed even more effective. Nicole McDermott at Greatist explains that in one study Gotha conducted with 30 female colleagues, “reaction times were shorter and accuracy was greater after the yoga session compared to 20 minutes of a treadmill.” Even more surprisingly, “jogging resulted in nearly the same cognitive performance as the baseline testing when the women didn’t exercise at all.”
These results should be seen as provisional and preliminary. “We need more rigorous and well-controlled intervention studies to confirm these initial findings,” Damoiseaux cautions. But they may contribute to growing evidence of the “mind-body connection” yoga helps foster. Better mood and lowered stress tend to improve brain health overall. Other studies support these conclusions, such as research showing how yoga practice over time enlarges the somatosensory cortex, which contains a “mental map” of the body and promotes greater self-awareness.
No doubt we’ll see many more studies on yoga and brain function in the coming years. For the time being, the science strongly suggests that when we hit the yoga mat to limber up and de-stress, we’re also helping to proof our brains against debilitating effects of aging like memory loss and cognitive decline. Read Gotha and Damoiseaux’s full survey of the neuroscience of yoga here.
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