#(this particular book really has very little to do with nonhuman communication; this was just the first big WTF moment I've had so far)

[paradife-loft]

truly, nothing gets me riled up about things I find in the books I'm reading like dubious claims about animal communication do 🙃🙃🙃🙃

#this week it's ''apes can't/don't kick out powerful asshole group members because they don't have language to tell each other about it!!'' #like honestly I'm as opposite of Team Ape as anyone's likely to get #but uhhhh to the claim that language is necessary to gang up on bullies..... #some behavior researchers in Seattle wearing scary masks would be just Fascinated to hear that #so idk if you Wanna throw your hat in on ''apes are substantially less socially capable than crows are'' but. ok sure have fun #James liveblogs books #(this particular book really has very little to do with nonhuman communication; this was just the first big WTF moment I've had so far)

[ibtk]

Book Review: THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY by Laura Jean McKay (2020)

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through Edelweiss and Library Thing's Early Reviewers program. Content warning for violence, including that against animals. Caution: this review contains a spoiler in the form of an excerpt.)

'Well, I’ve got a secret for you, Miss Kimberly Russo.' She digs her sharp little nails into my skin. ‘What is it?’ ‘This flu means people can talk to animals.’ Her head shoots up. ‘I want the flu, Granny. Don’t you?’ ‘Grown-ups don’t wish they had diseases, and neither should you.’ ‘But don’t you?’ Outside, Wallamina and Princess Pie are nose and beak to the sliding door, trying to press their way through. Eyes shining. ‘Course I bloody do.’

I can see the wild in her. She looks and acts like any dog. Plays, wags, stares into my eyes with her baby browns; does chasey, catch, begs for biscuits. Then the dusk comes and she lifts her neck and howls the saddest song in all the world, and there’s that wild. Dingo, owl, night thing — that sound is a warning. Loneliest you’ll hear. Wraps around your face, your sleep, your dreams. She’s saying: ‘Hey, hey. There’s something coming.’ The rangers here are always telling me, don’t talk like that. They say how dingoes are just establishing territory, checking on their pack. Dingo admin. But stand on the hot road that runs from the gift shop to the enclosures, and listen to the dingo in her cage call out to the packs on the other side of the fence. Tell me that’s not special. Tell me she doesn’t know something about the world that you and me haven’t ever thought of.

Jean Bennett isn't you're typical grandma - unless you're picturing Gemma Teller Morrow, that is. Jean drinks, smokes, swears, and sleeps around, usually all at the same time, and occasionally with her gay and committed coworker, Andy. She's got a tiger tattooed on her boob, and a dingo named Sue imprinted on her heart.

A lowly guide who dreams of becoming a ranger, Jean works at an Australian wildlife park, run by her son's ex-girlfriend Angela and owned by Angela's father. Jean and her husband Graham landed there years ago, after bouncing around the world for a while. Eventually Graham left Jean to shack up with another woman; their only child, Lee, jumped ship too, but not before hooking up with - and impregnating - Angela. Now Ange mostly keeps Jean around for the free child care (and maybe also because Ange feels sorry for her).

As for Jean, she stays stuck in this weird, awkward morass for her granddaughter Kimberley - one of the few people she can tolerate, let alone love. Jean prefers animals of the nonhuman variety, and the Park's residents/captives are her found family. She has a special place in her cockles for Sue, a dingo mix who she helped rescue as a wee little pup.

Jean's precarious life is already teetering on the edge of chaos when THE FLU arrives - first in southern Australia, then at the Park's gates, thanks to none other than an infected Lee, as charming as he is irresponsible.

Zoanthropathy (from Greek: zóo, “animal”, anthroponis, “human”, pathy, “disorder”), aka zooflu, otherwise known as "the talking animal disease," allow humans to understand and communicate with other animals:

'The strain known as zoanthropathy affects cognition in humans, and it is believed that enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals is possible. Zoanthropathy is hosted and spread by humans. [...] The disease is very high in morbidity and very low in mortality. Infected humans appear able to communicate (encode) and translate (decode) previously unrecognisable non-verbal communications via major senses such as sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound with nonhuman animals.'

When Lee runs off with Kimberley - to commune with the whales on the southern coast - Jean embarks on a cross-country road trip to find them. Riding shotgun is Sue, whose keen nose points the way to Tomorrow (Tomorrow being Sue's conceptualization of Kimberley. Jean is Yesterday, and Lee is Never There. Scathing, yet accurate.)

As with most potentially animal-friendly tales, I was equally nervous and excited to dive into THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY. As it is, the book both thrilled and disappointed me; I almost feel like it deserves two separate ratings, one for the idea and actualization of the dystopian zooflu future - which is breathtaking - and another for the human-centered plot that propels the audience's journey into this world - which is decidedly less so.

Let's start with the zooflu. It seems like it would be awesome to be able to talk to animals, right? Think again. I mean, really turn the idea over in your head, sit with the superpower, and try to envision what this might entail. Given that most of the nonhumans we encounter on the daily are exploited, oppressed, or otherwise negatively impacted by humans -

be it the 25 million farmed animals we create, torture, and kill for food every year in the US alone; the "wildlife" (read: free-living animals) we displace, starve, and kill through habitat loss; the dogs and cats we buy, neglect, and then abandon at shelters; or the animals we unintentionally hit with our cars (or the bugs we trod on just walking down the street); etc. x infinity

- we are weapons of mass destruction. To most of our nonhuman kin (and sometimes our fellow humans, too). Instead of words of wisdom and messages of hope, we'd be more likely to hear cries of terror. Confusion. Pain and agony. Hellfire, everywhere. Created and fueled by us and our own.

Heck, I'm not even sure it would be beneficial to always know exactly what our beloved, nonhuman family members are thinking. I have a fifteen-year-old dog named Finn who's going deaf and blind and battling dementia. More often than not, I suspect that being privy to his innermost thoughts would freak me the fuck out. Not to mention break my damn heart.

And then there's the mode of communication: not just just verbal, as we're used to, but all-encompassing: "sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound." Think pheromones, sound waves, scratches and ticks. The beating of countless tiny wings, all bombarding your brain and trying to tell you something. That kind of thing, coming at you uninvited and from all directions, is apt to drive a person mad. And it does, as evidenced by zooflu sufferers who stuff their orifices with whatever's handy to block incoming stimuli - or, at the more extreme end, the pseudo-religious trepanners who invite strangers to drill holes in their skulls in a misguided attempt to relieve the pressure.

Talking to animals sounds like the stuff of dreams - but in McKay's hands, it's a nightmare.

And a pretty trippy one, at that: fittingly, the incoming messages that Jean's left to decode aren't quite what you'd call straightforward. There's a lot of translation required, and Google hasn't yet caught up:

I’m reading her body like some language I barely remember from a high school textbook. Bonjour madame, connaissez-vous le chemin de la gare? Let’s go to the station. Or, where the hell is the supermarket? I can parrot the words, but the meaning is in scraps.

Copies of this book should be sold with a sheet of acid, or maybe some edibles. I kid, but also not.

If, like me, you assumed that increased understanding and compassion would surely spring forth from this newfound ability to communicate with nonhuman animals, you'd be wrong. While some people do indeed embrace the flu, many others lash out: animal-free zones are established, and hungry citizens start hunting former pets, since they make for easy prey (apparently they've never heard of fruits and veggies?).

There's one especially excruciating scene that I don't think I'll ever be able to forget. Jean takes refuge in a makeshift church, only to catch a glimpse of how the missionaries make their sausage (stew):

A small fluffy dog has pelted out a kitchen door, thin bit of twine tangled around its legs, body blonde fire, screaming, Hello. Please. Please bite its soft. Quick. Help me. I jump up, calling the poor little bugger, but the parishioners shriek louder, climbing on their chairs like that dog is the snake from the garden of Eden. The woman rushes for her daughter and hauls her by an arm out of the room. It’s funny, for a second, until the laugh dies in my throat. The little dog, too tangled in the twine to move, slumps panting in the aisle. It’s not just m e. Where’s other me. She’s still — The god-botherers are faster than me. They grab that dog with WWF wrestling passion, using real lumps of wood, real knives. The little dog has enough time to issue a thick whiff of terror from its undercarriage, Help her, before they’ve slit it ear to ear right there in the pulpit. There was no blood with Lee. He didn’t even look that drowned. He might have come alive any moment. He might be alive right now in his grave. This little dog, though, is bleeding out on the beige carpet. The door to the kitchen is open. Matthew the soup cook leans on the jamb, then turns back. A fluffy tail on a chopping board. The steaming pots. Pain like a stab to my guts — he stirs a soup very much like the one he was serving up in the park.

Of course, this scene is so repulsive to most of us - Jean included - only because the animal being killed and consumed is designated for "companionship" instead of "food," at least in this particular culture. Chances are you've known and loved a dog or two yourself - and so the doomed beast transforms from a something to a someone. Not an unfeeling object to be used and discarded at will, but a sentient creature with her own feelings, desires, and loved ones. Had it been a chicken or pig, the result wouldn't be quite so horrifying; Jean herself eats meat, and justifies doing so, on several occasions.

Yet an earlier scene - in which Jean comes upon an abandoned tractor trailer truck packed with pigs destined for slaughter - will hopefully challenge readers to expand their circle of compassion:

I’ve seen battery hogs before — of course I have. But not out and about. Not staggering around and trying to walk, calling to whatever they think is ‘more’. Glazed eyes that strain like they’ve never seen sunlight. Skin stretched over bodies fed to the point of bursting — something between swine and meat. Saw some animal liberationists on the street in the city one time, saying factory farms were the same as Nazi camps. I called them bloody racists too. The pigs clatter past me down the ramp, fucked-up eyes on the road ahead, calling, Hello is it more. Those animal nutters were wrong, but not in the way I thought. It’s not the same as the Nazis: that was us doing to us. What’s this? [...] A hurt sow sits on her haunches, then lies down on the verge, panting unevenly under the slathering sun. Another weaves blindly over the asphalt toward her, flies spinning around her head. They push their noses into each other. Send me a postcard, the sick one says. Postcard, indeed. What the fuck. I watch more closely. The meaning bright off that tight skin. All the little bits saying, Leave me, and, I’ll hear about it, and, Don’t you see it. Move on. There’s more. The ones that can walk stretch their legs, for, More, more, more. I stand at the top of the truck ramp watching them break into a group trot toward the next paddock. Skin rippling. Hooves carolling. Know that heart-in-your-mouth run. Know exactly what ‘more’ is. I’ve seen it in Lee and I’ve had it too, at times. These pigs are half dead, they’re stumbling around, blind, mad, and fucking hopeful.

Even if many of the characters in this book resist the humanity clearly evident in nonhuman animals, I hope that readers will hold these passages close - especially at the dinner table.

Sue, our main nonhuman protagonist, is a fascinating character; like many of the semi-domesticated animals in the park, McKay paints her as a series of conflicting impulses: safety or freedom. Hunger or satiation. Dingoes or humans. She is fiercely loyal, much to her own detriment. She has wants and needs of her own, and she's often satisfied to set them aside for the good of her (adopted) pack.

And I guess that brings me to the second half of this review: the humans, most of whom are awful. Jean, exponentially so.

Initially I thought that Jean would be my people: she's a hard-drinking, mold-breaking badass broad who gets on better with animals than people. She has a mini-rescue in her backyard where she keeps some of the park's doomed relinquishments. (The public treats the park like a rehab facility when in fact it's in the business of entertainment - old, sick, injured, and "common" animals are routinely killed.) She and Kimberley spend their afternoons together designing the animal rescue they hope to build one day.

But Jean is kind of a terrible person. To call her a misanthrope is half the story: she's also senselessly mean and cruel, especially when drunk, hungover, or frustrated (in other words, 90% of the time). I don't fault Jean for her substance abuse problem - alcoholism is a mental health issue and should be treated as such - but nor is it an excuse for being such an asshole. (There's even a scene where she trolls people discussing the zooflu online, like a fucking American redhat.) She's shit to everyone around her, except for Kimberley and Lee (Lee, who could use a good ass-kicking).

And then there's Sue: Sue, who followed Jean across the damn country when she should have been settling into a dingo pack of her own. Sue, who found Kimberley and saved Jean's life. Sue, who is nothing but good and true and trustworthy. Sue, who Jean assaults on multiple occasions: kicking her in the ribs, binding her with rope to prevent her escape, and even trying to shoot her (with a gun that's thankfully empty of bullets). At one point, she "forgives" Sue for saving her life - as if Sue's the one who needs forgiveness!

Despite the abuse, Sue continues to stick by Jean's side, which galled me endlessly. Towards the end of the story, following the attempted murder, Sue gets revenge of a sort, dominating a delirious Jean and forcing her subservience. However, the book ends shortly thereafter, cutting any sense of satisfaction far too short.

I really felt cheated with Jean: I thought she might be my avatar in this world - but she's just another terrible human who doesn't deserve the company of animals.

Likewise, the whole subplot involving Kimberley's parentage is way over the top dramatic and unnecessary; it seemed like we were being plucked from a dystopia and dropped into a soap opera for a minute there. Just, gross. So yeah, there are definitely some aspects of the book that I appreciated more than others. THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY may be imperfect - but I'd still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking to explore our relationship to nonhuman animals in a dystopian setting.

#books #reviews #book reviews #fiction #science fiction #dystopia #nonhuman animals #Laura Jean McKay #the animals in that country

[thelightfluxtastic]

30DayTheri 21: Media by Non-kin

I talked a while ago about how much I value media by and for therians and otherkin. But that’s few and far between, and there’s a lot of value in media made by self-identified humans that manages to tap into kinfeels. So that’s today’s topic. As might be totally expected, there’s an overlap with furry media. Anthropomorphic animals tap into that human-and-animal feeling and end up being relatable, especially if they have nonhuman quirks and instincts like growling or species-specific behaviors. I first started feeling my canine-ness when reading furry webcomics: Twokinds (warning for adult content) and Strays. Through them I discovered other webcomics, like Beyond the Western Deep. Beastars was already great for it’s complex themes and intense worldbuilding, but it really stole my heart with the character of Jack, and the parallels between dogs in that society and my experiences as a “gifted kid”. Jack seems tailor-made to be relatable to me. Even if it’s not specifically dogs, I find anthropomorphic/furry media just gets at that feeling of animality and feels very comfortable to me.

I feel special mention must be made of werewolf media. The therian community, after all, started on alt.horror.werewolves, and there’s a reason some therians still call themselves weres. I’ve definitely sought out werewolf media to get at canine feelings, shifts, etc. (And for other reasons, while I identify as a plain dog, werewolves are my connection point and self-portrayal in a voidpunk way). Being domestic, I tend to not go for the feral, violent werewolf stuff myself. My favorite werewolf media is anything that tries to convey wolves as they actually are in the wild- no dominance hierarchies, family bonds.  How to be a Werewolf is a great webcomic for that, and I wish there was more werewolf media like it. Naturally, something should also be said for transformation media- Brother Bear, Eustace becoming a dragon in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, etc. (Here’s a long list of movies on IMDB). And also for the media that’s told from an animalistic perspective- whether fantastical, like the Warriors books and Guardian’s of Ga’hoole, or more real-world, like the A Dog’s Purpose book/movie. Naturally as a dog therian, I have a penchant for talking-dog movies which are pretty dang common. Jack Saint has a video exploring their political implications if one takes at face value the dog’s sentience and human intelligence. I agree with his points regarding these movies if taken as a human metaphor, but at the same time they completely accurately tap into my feelings of domesticity and how I feel toward My People.

The last category I feel important to mention is documentaries. I for one encountered a lot when researching, but I also enjoy them on their own, and know many other therians do to. I get a lot of joy out of learning new things, and a new appreciation for any animal I learn about, including my own theriotype. There’s nothing quite like a good documentary to get into an animal’s mindset, to connect to a particular habitat or environment, to appreciate the world a little better. I’ll end this with a list of the media that were my particular obsessions or hit meaningful moments for me:

Tarzan (movie and show)

The Jungle Book

Young Wizards (books, completely altered my perception of life and animism)

White Fang

Good Boy (movie) (the talking dog movie I remember best)

In An Absent Dream (the sheer hiraeth)

Fangs webcomic

Dogs Decoded (Nova Documentary)

This one specific HP animagus comic

How to Be a Good Creature (book by Sy Montgomery, I swear when I read this I was convinced the author was kin or maybe kith and just didn’t know it)

#30 Days of Therianthropy #mine #media #therian #otherkin

[sciencespies]

Which animals talk the most? Depends on how you define 'talk'

https://sciencespies.com/nature/which-animals-talk-the-most-depends-on-how-you-define-talk/

Which animals talk the most? Depends on how you define 'talk'

A pandemonium of parrots, a cackle of hyenas, an exaltation of larks – these are just a few of the animals that we define by the sounds they make. 

For humans, communication is the bedrock of our relationships and part of how we successfully function in our daily lives. Animals make sounds to issue warnings, attract mates, signal distress, find one another and defend their territory; similarly to us, their vocal cords fulfill myriad purposes that lay their social foundations and ensure their survival. 

But have you ever wondered, of all the creatures we share our planet with, which one vocalizes the most? And what value is there in being a chatterbox, when making sounds also carries a risk of alerting predators?

In human terms, we might measure “chattiness” in two ways: the amount of time spent vocalizing, and the diversity of what’s communicated by those sounds.

How does this apply to nonhuman species? Researchers have identified some common trends in species that vocalize a lot, and common trends in those that prefer quieter lives. 

Related: Why do birds sing the same song over and over?

Social creatures

You might assume that one driving factor of animal communication would be how social the species is.

It’s true that some highly social species are also more voluble; for example, flocking birds such as quelea are constantly cacophonous on the wing. Then, there are mammals like the meerkat, a small, mongoose-like creature from southern Africa that lives in large, gregarious communities that cooperatively raise young, forage, and look out for predators. 

“When they’re foraging, they’re always chirping away, just so everyone knows, ‘I’m here; it’s me; everything’s OK; there are no predators around.’ They’re constantly making this soft, gentle contact call,” said Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who studies animal vocal communication and uses algorithms to analyze and compare their sounds. 

But this isn’t a rule; being social doesn’t necessarily mean an animal communicates a lot, Kershenbaum told Live Science.

That’s because vocalizing also comes at a cost. “Most animals try not to vocalize too much, because it actually requires a lot of energy,” said Kershenbaum, who is the author of the book “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy” (Penguin Press, 2021), part of which delves into animal communication. 

Another factor is predation: Sounds put an animal at risk of potentially being caught. These two features place powerful pressures on the vocal communication of even highly social species, like the chimpanzee, one of our closest living relatives.

(Photostock-Israel/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)

“Chimpanzees vocalize very little, not as much as you would expect, given the complexity of their social groups,” Kershenbaum said. To keep audible communication to a minimum, they often use gestures to communicate instead. 

However, vocals aren’t necessarily the gold standard of animal communication.

“Animals are constantly broadcasting information, whether it’s vocal, olfactory, through posture – it’s all being assessed by other animals, who form an integrative idea of what to do and how to interact with this individual,” Kershenbaum said.

When it comes to vocal communication, social species tend to have a greater diversity in the messages they convey, Kershenbaum said.

As a general rule, animals that are solitary need to communicate simpler messages to the rest of the world, compared with animals that live in cooperative groups where communication is necessary to maintain social hierarchies, locate and share food and alert one another to threats.

“You can see that if you’re in a cooperative group, there may be more to say than if you’re living on your own,” Kershenbaum said. 

Related: Do animals hug each other?

However, it can quickly become tricky territory when we try to dissect what animals are “saying” when they vocalize. One reason for this is that humans make the mistake of judging animal sounds by our standard of what counts as communication – specifically, through the framework of words. 

There is evidence that some animal calls have specific meanings (a type of information researchers call referential communication) that could be considered word-like.

For example, some monkeys issue specific alarm calls that signify a predator threat, and dolphins have distinct whistling sounds for different relatives. “They use this particular sound as a name, which could be considered a word,” Kershenbaum said. 

But these utterances occur only in scenarios where a single sound is the most efficient way to communicate one specific thing, he said.

“I think it’s, in general, a mistake to look at animal communication as being made of words,” Kershenbaum said. 

So, animal communication doesn’t consist of discrete “words” with unique meanings, like our speech does.

That idea is borne out by songbirds; although they have some of the most complex vocal sequences of all living things, these sequences usually occur in scenarios where the relative simplicity of what the bird needs to communicate – like calling for a mate or defending its territory – doesn’t match the mind-boggling diversity of sounds that each call contains, Kershenbaum explained. So what’s going on here? 

One theory is that the medium itself is the message. Effectively, birds could be saying, “Look what a complex song I can sing! That means I must be a really good father,” Kershenbaum said. In some sense, vocal acrobatics may be a substitute for colorful plumage, which is another way birds attract mates. 

(Elfi Koch/EyeEm/Getty Images)

In fact, “Some species of birds, like mockingbirds or African gray parrots, steal sounds from other species out in the wild to sound smarter, so to speak,” says Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in New York who studies songbirds as a model for how humans learn to speak.

Those parrots and mockingbirds suggest that individual vocalizations probably aren’t communicating discrete messages in the way words do when humans speak; because they’re lifted from a completely different species, they’re unlikely to have transferable meanings.

It’s more likely that these are just new sounds that have been added to a vocal repertoire, rather than sounds with individual significance.

Although animals may not be saying multiple discrete things in the way our speech does, their vocalizations are nevertheless rich and dense with meaning. 

Listen and learn

Whatever animals are saying, some spend a lot more time vocalizing than others. So who are those chatty individuals, and what makes this blabbing worth their while?

Related: Do animals laugh?

According to Jarvis, animals can be split into two broad groups: nonvocal (or “innate”) learners, and vocal learners, animals that learn to vocalize by imitating sounds.

Only a few groups of animals fall into the vocal-learning camp: humans, songbird species, and some nonhuman mammals, including dolphins, whales, elephants, seals, and bats. 

“What’s curious,” Jarvis said, “is that those animals that have vocal learning are also some of the animals that are vocalizing the most.” He also found that these animals are more likely to make more complex vocal sequences. 

Jarvis is interested in why these vocal learners vocalize more often, and more complexly.

On one hand, there’s a huge advantage to vocalizing a lot.

For starters, sound travels over long distances, so communicating more frequently can aid communication over large areas, helping animals lay claim to territory or find a mate. Being more voluble and making more complex calls also enable some animals to convey more information to others about their status.

On the other hand, there are the aforementioned risks of vocalizing more: Making sound uses energy and attracts predators. 

Jarvis hypothesized that the most vocal animals are typically the ones that have to worry less about predators. Interestingly, he noticed that especially voluble vocal learners “tend to be near the top of the food chain – like humans, whales, and dolphins or elephants. Or, they’re vocalizing in the ultrasonic range [so can’t be heard], like bats,” he said.

“Amongst the birds, we found that the parents in the songbirds were descended from apex predators. So their ancestors were at the top of the food chain. So I think they overcome predation and then get away with vocalizing a lot.” 

What’s more, especially chatty animals have a system that minimizes the associated energy costs of constantly making sounds. 

Muscles in the larynx – aka the voice box – of vocal animals take up some of the largest amounts of energy in the body, and their activities require fast-firing neurons to control vocalizations. In turn, the activities of those neurons can generate toxic byproducts, similarly to the production of lactic acid, by working muscles that then need to be cleared away.

Jarvis explained that vocal animals, including humans, share protein molecules that protect these fast-firing neurons from a toxin overload. “So us humans and songbirds and parrots and others have independently evolved mechanisms to protect our vocal pathway neurons, so that we can communicate a lot.”

(ALesik/iStock/Getty Images)

In other words, for highly vocal species, vocalizing confers a huge advantage, with relatively little cost. There are exceptions to this, however; for instance, zebra finches are vocal learners that vocalize only a little.

“But on average, the vocal learners have a more complex vocal repertoire,” Jarvis said. “Those who are vocalizing the most in terms of time are the ones who, on average, are producing more complex vocalizations.”

So, who takes the crown for chattiest animal?

“Nobody I know has really gone out there and quantified all the species to say that this is the case” – but the short answer would be that it’s a member of the vocal-learning species, Jarvis said.

Kershenbaum made an educated guess that among these vocal-learning animals, dolphins would be strong contenders for the title, based on his research. “If you are ever in the water with dolphins, it’s almost never quiet,” Kershenbaum said. “They’re always, always vocalizing.” 

Jarvis now devotes part of his research to investigating what vocal learners can tell us about human spoken language: He has identified certain genetic mutations in vocal-learning songbirds that could shed some light on how speech disorders occur in humans.

So studying how animals communicate is more than just a curiosity; it could help us understand ourselves. 

Related content:

Do any animals know their grandparents?

Will humans ever learn to speak whale?

Which animal has the stretchiest mouth?

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

#Nature

#Nature

[neen-writes]

Silver for Monsters -- Ch. 4

Series: Witcher/Fairy Tail

Pairing: Gajevy

Summary: In a world ravaged by monsters where magic is becoming outlawed and nonhumans are hunted, the Witcher known as Black Steel Gajeel takes up a contract. He expects to find a simple old herbalist, terrorized by a beast in the woods. But in his many years he has learned to never trust what he expects.

Note: big thanks to @spikerr and @bluuesparrow for being my sounding boards and reading through this for me!! :D (yes I consistently forget to tag)

Ch. 1 Ch. 2 Ch. 3

“What on earth are you doing here?” Lucy asked urgently, ushering them both into the common room.  She cast more than one questioning glance at the large Witcher, who looked profoundly out of place in the quaint home.  He remained quiet, looking to the area around them before studying the blonde in her blue dress.  An expensive, ornate gold necklace sat over her collarbone, glimmering in the ambient light, and a ring of braided hair laid across the top of her head, from which a cascade of long golden hair rained.  She looked like a sorceress, with her tight enough and low enough gown.  And clearly one with gifts in polymorphy.  It explained why she managed to live in a place like this.

“I’m so sorry to drop in on you like this, I know how dangerous it is,” Levy began, but Lucy waved it off.  “I needed to see if you were alright, and I had no other way to reach you.”

Lucy’s expression darkened just a fraction in anticipation of the real reason she was here as she settled on a chaise across from where her friend sat on the small cushioned sofa.  The Witcher took up post at the edge of the room, arms crossed.  “Things have gotten worse, the pyres burn daily now.  But I’m no worse off, no one suspects me yet,” she tilted her head, lifting a slender brow at her friend, and the large man, “Certainly nothing bad enough to warrant worry or a visit… with a bodyguard.  I don’t hate seeing you again, Levy but… really, why have you come?”  The worry in her voice was evident, knowing something must have happened to bring her friend to her, with a Witcher.

“I was found,” Levy said, staring at her hands.  Lucy straightened immediately, “I was captured rather, in a refugee camp, and they kept me in Dimeritum, feeding me something to keep me down until a Redanian company arrived,” she paused, lifting a weighted gaze at her friend, “in Velen.  Unimpeded.  If they know I’m still alive, we are all in danger.  I needed to reach you, and be sure you were still safe.  And I need to try and use my megascope to reach the others.  Radovid is planning something, and somehow he’s involved the Emperor in it.  If they are cooperating then…”

“Our days of hiding are limited,” Lucy finished, finally settling her gaze on the quiet observer.  “And him?  Is he how you escaped?”

“Partially,” Levy answered.

“Name’s Gajeel,” he finally spoke up, waving a single finger.

Lucy looked surprised as her eyes went immediately to the twin swords on his back, recognizing the name, “So not just any Witcher.  One with a reputation.”

“I needed to get here and I couldn’t teleport more than the one time to get us out,” Levy clarified, “so an escort was needed.”

Lucy looked thoughtful for a second, before getting up to head for a large shelf, full of bottles and vials of varying size.  “Some of the witch hunters have figured out how to process Dimeritium further, grind it into a powder fine enough it can be added into food in small amounts.  Add more than a small pinch, and you’ll taste it.  But a pinch that small isn’t enough to do much.  So they must have given it over… many days,” she glanced back at Levy, her words slowing down when she started to realize the conditions she may have been in.  “It’s not permanent but it will systemically dampen your magic.  I have something I can give you to counteract it, but you won’t be one hundred percent until it fully leaves your system,” the blonde explained returning to her friend with a bottle. “Drink the whole thing.”

Levy nodded, pulling out the cork and downing the contents without a second thought.  She winced at the bitterness.  “Have you been able to reach anyone?  Is there anyone I can try to communicate with?” she asked after the taste had subsided.

Lucy looked to her feet, taking a seat again.  “You haven’t heard anything?” the blonde asked, tentatively.  Her friend’s face was her answer.  “Oh, okay. Well ah… Mira has done the best of us really, she took your route.  She’s the only one I’ve been able to reach reliably, she’s in White Orchard as a healer.  They like her there.”

“Sounds about right,” Levy mused with a small smile.

“Last I heard Juvia was with the druids in Skellige, but she refuses to talk to me.  I was able to contact her once, months ago, I think she only did it as a courtesy to me.  To let me know she was okay.  But after everything, after the summit, she never wants to see us again.”

Levy stirred uncomfortably at the mention of the summit-turned-massacre.  She couldn’t blame her for it, not after all the horrors of that day; a day that was supposed to end with treaties.  They all barely escaped with their lives, and she had needed to think fast to ensure she could maintain her escape.  It took some quick creativity and several inches of her hair, but she had managed to be among the reported dead that day, a convenient advantage.  But at some point someone had figured out the truth, and drove her out.  So much for that.  “And Erza?”

The blonde’s shoulders slumped, and it took a moment for her to answer.  “I don’t know.  The last word I got of her was nearly a year ago.  She was trying to work with the Nilfgaardians, advise them on enchanted weaponry to give an upper hand in the war.  They had offered her protection and immunity in exchange.  Her last contact with me,” Lucy paused, looking deeply troubled, “She reached me through her megascope, she was urgent.  She’d found out they had no intention of giving what they promised, and after they got enough information from her they were going to use her in negotiations with the Redanians.  She said she would tell me more when she reached me, or reached another megascope, that the Redanians had some plans for ‘us.’  Last anyone saw her, she was fleeing Vizima; now both sides want her.”

“I suspect she never made it here. And no one has seen her since?” Levy asked, already knowing the answer.

“We don’t know if she’s dead or alive, and I’ve tried divination.  Nothing works.  She’s completely blocked.”

“She knew how to disrupt divinations to stay out of sight,” Levy commented, “It’s possible it may be intentional?”  Hope was evident in her voice.

Lucy nodded slowly, “I’d thought of that.  It’s the only thing that brings me comfort while I search for more information.  I have one, ah, contact in the city, who gets me whisperings now and then.  But I can’t see him often.”

The shorter mage was quiet for several moments, looking to her lap.  Erza’s disappearance disturbed her greatly, and the fact that the two sides of the war had cooperated already on another occasion, with the purpose of obtaining another Lodge sorceress, was a problem.  Levy’s was not an isolated incident and Erza Scarlet was arguably the strongest among them, barring when someone poked Mirajane’s wild temper.  It could be possible that someone had their hands on Erza, or had already disposed of her.  But Levy couldn’t shake the nagging thought that she and Erza had very deliberately been left alive.  Previously the prices on their heads had been dead or alive: why not kill Erza when she was in the palace?  Why not kill her as soon as she was discovered alive rather than waiting for the Redanians?

Levy looked up, ready to reply to her, when the Witcher cleared his throat.

“Sorry to interrupt your little reunion but I got ya here.  Now unless there’s some fine print, that’s the end of my contract.”  He wasn’t in a particular rush to get away from her, but he’d done what he was employed to and he had no more reason to stay.  And the longer he stayed, the longer he risked getting tangled in something he shouldn’t.  Clearly something intricate was afoot with the two of them and the rest of them, and it wasn’t something he was sure he wanted to be a part of.

Levy rose, looking slightly abashed.  She had all but forgotten he was there, and he was right.  It was time she pay him, even if she didn’t know what she was going to do now.  “Yes, of course,” she said, glancing to Lucy, “Are all my things still upstairs?”

The blonde nodded quickly, “It’s all where you left it, in the guest room.”

The blue-haired mage nodded to her friend, and beckoned the Witcher to follow her up the narrow stairway.  Gajeel kept his head lowered slightly, grumbling internally at the low ceilings.  She pushed open a door with a loud creak, entering a large room that was filled, floor to ceiling on all four walls, with books.  Two large chests were nestled amongst them to the left, and in the center of the room were the three posts of her megascope.  

Gajeel stopped in the doorway, not even remotely surprised by what he saw within.  She wasn’t joking when she said she had more belongings here.  

The mage went straight to the chests, pushing one open with another creak and he leaned forward to try and peek inside.  He could see piles of clothing, but not much else until she dug in and pulled out a few coin-purses.  Gajeel lifted his brows, watching her peek into each one and weigh them out in her hands, until she picked one of the larger ones and buried the rest within.

She stood to face him resolutely, presenting the Witcher with the pouch.  “Your pay.” She didn’t look at him, and her tone was detached.

Gajeel tilted his head slightly, taking the coin from her.  She’s distracted.  “What will you do now?” he asked carefully.

Levy slumped her shoulders, unsure how to answer.  “Frankly, I don’t know.  I have work to do here.  I need to… look into some things.”  She glanced around the room, at the familiarity of her books and equipment, before looking to him.  “And you, Witcher?  Will you seek out your friend?  Your horse?” she smiled, tilting her head a little.

Gajeel nodded, “Eventually.  I have a mount for now, I ain’t in a hurry.  Follow the Path; I’ll meet up with him sooner or later.”

“You sure you want to leave so soon?  We came a long way.  I’m sure Lucy would not mind if you stayed for a meal or a night of rest,” Levy offered, sounding more hopeful than she intended.

Reluctantly, the Witcher shook his head, “I appreciate it but I got a hell of a cravin’ for some beer, and I know some folk in town I hope to see at the Rosemary.” See, brawl with, get into some kind of competition.  The Rosemary and Thyme was one of the few taverns he had not been banned from… yet anyway.

Levy nodded, understanding, tilting her head to the side.  She wanted to ask him to stop by before he left the city, that she wanted to see him again.  But she didn’t know him, and as much as it seemed nice, she had something much bigger to worry about now.  Still, “Thank you, Gajeel.  I appreciate your help.”

The Witcher huffed in acknowledgment, not one too skilled with goodbyes.  “Just business, Shorty,” he smirked toothily, watching her prickle with annoyance as just a hint of static tickled his skin. She stomped towards him, and he moved aside to presumably let her out of the room. But instead, she stopped in front of him and stood there a moment, glaring up at the man for several moments with fire in her eyes. But after a few seconds of silently staring at one another, she softened just slightly.

Levy rose as far up on tiptoe as she could, and kissed him on his scruffy cheek.  The Witcher’s eyes went wide, and he felt a literal shock fly through him as he jolted back against the doorframe.  He stared, slack-jawed at her as she dropped back down and smiled at him with great satisfaction. “It’s been a pleasure to have met you, Black Steel,” she said, turning from him with a flick of her hair before the color reached her cheeks, and descended down the stairs.  

Gajeel stalled for a moment, blinking wordlessly in her wake.  He flexed his hands over and over for what felt like forever after she disappeared at the bottom of the stairs, and the voices of the two women floated up to him.  He shook his head, rubbed his still tingling cheek, and headed down the stairs to see himself out.

The Witcher pushed open the door to the loud tavern and inhaled deeply.  The smell of smoke, alcohol, and sweat.  It was always busy, day or night, and had changed completely from the last time he was here.  The Rosemary and Thyme had been a fairly young business the last few times he had been, and the very last time was not… his best.  Now the establishment was in full swing.

He smirked to himself, heading up to the bar and taking at seat at one of the stools.  The tavern-owner had her back to him, organizing the bottles on the shelf behind the bar, completely unaware that he had shown up.  

“Oi, Alberona,” he called out to her, and she nearly dropped the bottle of vodka in her hands.  Nearly.  The woman would never waste good liquor.  

The brunette whirled to face him, eyes wide.  “Gods above!  If it isn’t Black Steel himself!” she exclaimed, her surprise very quickly turning sour.  “I hope you have my damned money this time, I’m still trying to pay for the repairs!” she hissed, glancing to the wall to their left, shoddily boarded up.

“Good to see ya too, Cana.”  Gajeel followed her gaze and grinned, puffing up with a touch of pride.  “That fucker deserved it, and you know it,” the Witcher retorted, before leaning to the side to dig into the pouch at his side.  He produced the coin purse the sorceress had given him and opened it slightly before sliding it towards her.  “Take whatever’ll cover the repairs and a night’s worth of Kaedweni.  In my favorite stein if ya still got it.”

“You mean if the pyro hasn’t melted it down?” Cana replied, still staring at the coin purse in front of her before she snatched it to keep it from the eyes of anyone else Gajeel might have to toss through a wall.  “Been busy have you?  What sorta contract landed you this?” she commented, before handing the rest of it back to him.

“Nothing special,” he shrugged.  “Simple escort.”

“Mhm, right,” she replied, reaching under the bar to produce the pewter stein with the iron handle.  She had only just started to pour when a familiar voice boomed through the tavern.

“Metalhead!”

A look of ‘oh no’ flashed across Cana’s face as a wicked grin spread on Gajeel’s.  

Aside from the loud voice, the hum of his wolf amulet also announced the presence of the newcomer.  “Salamander!”  The Witcher spun around on his stool and leaned back against the bar to acknowledge the rosy-haired man that had just arrived.  Soot dusted his face and coated his arms, and Gajeel couldn’t figure out if he was wearing a black tunic or if it used to be another color.  The black was an even layer over his pulled-back hair, only allowing flashes of the rosy pink to show through.  The only thing missing was his blacksmith’s apron.  “Fresh from the forges, eh?”

“You got a lot of nerve showin’ back up here after last time,” the man growled, taking a seat two stools down from the Witcher.  He glanced, pointedly, to the damaged wall.  “And don’t call me Salamander,” he warned, and Gajeel could have sworn a thread of smoke rose from the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t give me a reason or I’ll toss ya again, flame-brain,” Gajeel retorted, thinking quite fondly of his last visit.  When he had sent a very drunk blacksmith through the wall with an equally drunk casting of Aard.  He didn’t even remember what the man had said to piss him off, but Gajeel knew he deserved it.

“The fuck you will, cat-eyes,” Cana interjected, sliding the beer towards Gajeel, who twisted around to grab the handle.  She was already pouring one for the blacksmith in an attempt to placate him.  

Grumbling, Natsu took the offered drink and glared at the Witcher a moment longer before he broke out in a large smile and held up his own pint to clink against Gajeel’s.  Tension visibly left Cana’s body as she rolled her eyes at the two men before she went back to work.  “The hell you doin’ back in Novigrad?  City hasn’t exactly been the nicest place to be lately.  Looking for me to make you another masterpiece?”  He looked, pointedly, to the hilt of the steel sword on Gajeel’s back.

Gajeel took a large swing of the dark stout, sighing with heavy satisfaction.  “Contract,” he replied, “Caught in some Lodge business,” he added with a hushed tone.

Natsu nearly choked on his beer and held up a tattooed arm to his frothy mouth, trying to keep from spitting the cherry beer on his old friend.  “You what?” he asked, looking around them.  “That’s risky.”

The Witcher lifted a brow at his reaction.  “Had your own run-ins, eh?” he asked, looking at the right arm covered in black tangles of ink that trailed up farther than what his tunic covered.  “Still trying t’ figure that out?” he gestured with his beer before taking another swig.

Natsu grimaced, returning to his drink as well.  “Sorta.  I know someone in Farcorners.  We uh, help each other, she keeps an ear out for anything for this,” he looked to his arm, “and I have pretty good ears myself.”

Gajeel blinked, before laughing to himself at the coincidence, “Well shit.”

Natsu looked at him for a second, and without having to say it out loud they realized they were speaking about the same blonde sorceress.  “So you found your own.  Like I said, bad place to come.”

The Witcher looked into his beer, thinking of the blue-haired mage he’d left at the edge of witch hunter territory.  The one he was trying to purge from his thoughts with beer.  Maybe now that he had seen her again and helped her she would leave his dreams.  He couldn’t even say why he had dreamt about her in the first place, but with any luck alcohol would fix it.  “Don’t I know it.  But you seem to be doin’ fine for yerself.”

“Thank the damn sage who wrote such a convincing curse,” the blacksmith replied bitterly, swigging his Rivian beer.

“Eh, coulda done a better meat-suit,” Gajeel taunted with a smirk, tensing in case the fiery man decided to lash out.  Thankfully, it seemed the beer had already started to work to placate his friend’s combustible demeanor.  “So what have ya heard?  I been sloughing through Velen for a few months, a little outta the loop.”

Natsu took a deep breath and looked upwards, arranging his thoughts before he looked around him again.  Yes, the Rosemary was a generally safe place; Cana worked very hard to only allow a certain kind of clientele, but it never hurt to be safe.  “The witch hunts are in full swing, Radovid keeps handing over coin and power to them and the temple guard.  The city’s a worse and worse place for people like us to be, and you brought your contract here at a bad time,” he warned, “A Nilfgaardian envoy was here a week ago, met with and left alive from a council with Radovid’s advisers themselves.”

Gajeel raised his pierced brow in surprise, intrigued about the timing. “Ya know what about?”

The blacksmith shook his head, “Not at all.  Just happened to be at the docks when they showed up.”

“They?”

“It was strange.  The Nilfgaardian I coulda spotted a mile away.  But someone else arrived too, separate.  Dressed in common-clothes.  He wore no crest,” he explained.

Gajeel shifted, taking a few more gulps of his stout and savoring the warmth in his gut.  The pieces all lined up too coincidentally, except for the mystery visitor.  That was the one wild card.  He didn’t know exactly how long Levy had been in that camp, but he did know when the Redanians had showed up for her.  “His Highness still in port?”

“He is.”

“Any activity over the last couple days?”

Natsu glanced at him, wondering what exactly his friend knew, and where he was going with it.  “Yeah; some of his generals leaving in a hurry about four days ago.”

That was it.  There was the connection.  Gajeel narrowed his eyes before downing the rest of his beer.  He stared into the bottom of the pewter stein, and wondered how invested he cared to be in this information.  In the fact that the pieces lined up, and somehow it boiled down to the sorceress he had just delivered to King Radovid’s genocidal doorstep.  “I need another drink.”

“Wolves asleep amidst the trees… bats all a-swaying in the breeze…”

A singing voice, rough, edged with a higher pitch, rose above the bubbling river.  The moist soil sloshed beneath his worn boots, threatening to slow his pace.  But not quite as much as the struggling soldier, clawing at the black, nebulous layer over his face that kept him from making a sound beyond the strangled hums in his chest.  The tall merchant held the soldier by the back collar of his armor in a grip that dented the metal.

“But one soul lies anxious wide awake,” he flourished up a hand, dancing his fingers to the melody, “fearing all manner of ghouls, hags, and wraiths…”

The soldier kicked, trying to tear from the iron grip, and the singing stopped.

“Now now, don’t interrupt,” the merchant’s rough, gravelly voice cooed, “It will be less comfortable if you keep struggling.”  He turned his head, focusing reddish brown eyes on the defiant prisoner.  He kicked and struggled, but he had far less life in him than before.  The soldier’s feet found no purchase, and he had been dragged far enough from any camp that none saw him.  Even along the banks of the Pontar, few people wandered this far and this close to water unless they sought a run-in with a Water Hag.

But the merchant attracted no such attention, in fact all life seemed to keep out of a very distinct radius from the thin man.  They traveled, uninterrupted, until the shoreline became rocky, rising up into a large outcropping over the bank.  He dragged the Redanian into a cave, ignoring the sudden fervor, the last bit of fight from his prisoner.  It wasn’t the fact they had arrived at such a secluded location that reawakened his panic.

It was the fact that when the Redanian looked up to the merchant to curse him wordlessly, he did not see the man from before.  He saw the leathery grey skin.  He saw the inhumanly wide grin that now bore fangs instead of teeth.  He saw the ram-like horns that curled from the sides of his skull and the long canine ears behind them.  And he saw the orange-red eyes glow in the shadows, turn upon him with mischievous malice.  He had the shape of a man, and yet was so very much not.

“‘Why am I here? What does it want with me?’” the creature spoke in a mocking tone, waving a free hand and brandishing black claws on each of his four fingers.  “‘Will I die here, oh no~,’” he continued, letting out a laugh that sounded like smacking two rocks together.  “The answer is yes, sorry,” he stated matter-of-factly, dropping the Redanian into the soil as they reached the back of the cave.  Small holes in the roof let in rays of light, revealing very little beyond a large stone reservoir, like the bottom of a fountain.  It was empty, but the carvings along its base were intricate and appeared very, very old.

The soldier, free of the demon’s grip, scrambled to get back to his feet, despite the black veil over his nose and mouth.  He barely made onto his elbows when a crushing force crashed down onto his back, forcing him face-first into the mud.  “Ah-ah, we can’t have that,” the male cautioned, pressing a large canine foot down onto the center of his back and poising a large black claw over the back of his neck.  Its tip brushed against the rise of a vertebra.  “I need you, mouse.  Or, rather, your life.  Cogs to turn, pots to stir,” he bobbed his head back and forth,  “Divinations and hydromancy are such fun tricks, but their style is so very bland.  So limited.  One can be… what’s the word,” he ran clawed fingers through his crest of black hair in thought, “so much more creative with blood magic…”  

Understanding his life was about to end, his victim tried, to no avail, to get out from under the demon’s foot or to get away.  Ah, I’m missing the best part of these things, he thought, suddenly snapping his fingers.  The black veil dissolved from the man’s face, and as soon as he realized his ability to speak, he turned his frantic words to his attacker.  “Who are you?!  You will regret attacking the Redanian army, freak!” he screamed, and the demon applied sudden, heavier pressure to his back as he coughed in pain.  

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.  I merely stole you, and none of your ‘army’ even noticed.  You are becoming part of something much bigger.  I might say this is the most important thing you’ve ever done, mouse,” he smiled, “But because you asked, you can take my name to the grave.”  He leaned forward towards the man, shadows befalling his face, “They call me Zink.”  With his final courtesy of words to the man, before he plunged his claws into the back of his neck.  The man struggled, screaming loud enough to echo through the cave, but the demon merely pressed down harder.  The backplate of his armor caved in with a crunch, and his claws sliced deeper into the man’s flesh, one slipping in between vertebrae.  The man went still, and the screaming died with guttural coughs.

As quickly as he had inflicted the damage, he eased off, only to grab him by the hair and lift him with relative ease.  He hauled the twitching corpse over to the stained stone bowl, holding the gushing wound over it such that a small pool of blood collected.  When he felt he had enough, he tossed the body aside like trash.  I’ll feed it to the Drowners later.

The man muttered several words to himself as the blood rippled and moved, subtly at first, then more violently.  Zink gripped the edges of the vessel and leaned over it, some strands of black hair dangling over his brow.  It danced as though alive, and in it he slowly started to see the image of a small mage, accompanied by a blonde woman.  “Ah, two out of five,” he muttered, a devilish grin spreading across his angular face.  “And they all fall in line, one… by… one.”  Glowing orange eyes looked to the mouth of the cave, and that cracking laugh filled the space.

#Gajevy #fairy tail #witcher au #fanfiction #ftfanfics

[randomguywholikesstuff]

Quotes From: Jonathan Haidt. “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”[2]

Reprocity

“Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life...

For all the nonhuman ultrasoeial species, that feature was the genetics of kin altruism....

Here's where the ancestors of bees, termites, and mole rats took the common mechanism of kin altruism, which makes many species sociable, and parlayed it6 into the foundation of their u nco m m o n ultrasociality: They are all siblings. T h o s e species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family...

We h u m a n s also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship n a m e s for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents' friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah”

“The human mind finds kinship deeply appealing, and kin altruism surely underlies the cultural ubiquity of nepotism”

“In his insightful book Influence, Robert Cialdinj of Arizona S t a t e University cites this a n d other s t u d i e s as e v i d e n c e that p e o p l e h a v e a mindless, automatic reciprocity reflex. Like other animals, we will p e r f o r m certain behaviors w h e n the world p r e s e n t s us with certain patterns of input...

ethological reflex: a p e r s o n receives a favor from an a c q u a i n t a n c e a n d wants to repay the favor...

“So what is really built into the person is a strategy: Play tit for tat. Do to others wha t they do unto you .”

“Like the Godfather, bats play tit for tat, and so do other social animals, particularly those that live in relatively small, stable groups where individuals can recognize each other as individuals.12”

“Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit' for tat. Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely b e c a u s e they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum g a m e s . 1 3 A species equipped with vengeance and gratitude responses can support”

“larger and more cooperative social groups because the payoff to cheaters is reduced by the costs they bear in making enemies.Conversely, the benefits of generosity are increased because one gains friends.”

“the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to m a n a g e larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals”

Gossip 

“Language allows small groups of people to bond quickly and to learn from each other about the bonds of others..

in short, Dunbar proposes that language evolved because it enabled gossip. Individuals who could share social information, using any primitive means of communication, had an advantage over those who could not...

And once people began gossiping, there was a runaway competition to master the arts of social manipulation, relationship aggression, and reputation management, all of which require yet more brain power”

“Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone's reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally...

Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information...

In a world with no gossip, people would not get away with murder but they would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations. Gossip extends our moral—emotional toolkit. In a gos-sipy world, we don't just feel vengeance and gratitude toward those who hurt or help us; we feel pale but still instructive flashes of c o n t e m p t and anger toward people whom we might not even know. We feel vicarious s h a m e and embarrassment when we hear about people whose s c h e m e s , lusts, and private failings are exposed. G o s s i p is a policeman and a teacher.

Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance...

As long as everyone plays tit-for tat a u g m e n t e d by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully. (It rarely does, however, because of our self-serving biases a n d massive hypocrisy.”

 Reprocity in Intimate Relaitonships

“Relationships are exquisitely sensitive to balance in their early stages, and a great way to ruin things is either to give too m u c h (you seem perhaps a bit desperate) or too little (you seem cold and rejecting). Rather, relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure...

people often don't realize the degree to which the disclosure of personal information is a gambit in the d a t i n g game. W h e n s o m e o n e tells you about past romantic relationships, there is conversational pressure for you to do the same. If this disclosure card is played too early, you might feel ambivalence—your reciprocity reflex m a k e s you prepare your own matching disclosure but s o m e other part of you resists sharing intimate details with a near-stranger”

“humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive. Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others”

Hypocrisy

“There is a special pleasure in the irony of a moralist brought down for the very moral failings he has condemned. It's the pleasure of a well-told joke. With hypocrisy, the hypocrite's preaching is the setup, the hypocritical action is the punch line”

“Players f a c e a binary choice at each point: They can cooperate or defect. Each player then reacts to what the other player did in the previous round.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap b e t w e e n action and p e r c e p t i o n is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?”

“Niccolo Machiavelli”

“the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are...

People who reported being most concerned about caring for others and about issues of social responsibility were more likely to open the bag, but they were not more likely to give the other person the positive task. In other words, people who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to "do the right thing" and flip the coin but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Batson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality "moral hypocrisy”

“We are well-armed for battle in a Machiavellian world of reputation manipulation, and one of our most important weapons is the delusion that we are non-combatants. How do we get away with it?”

Confirmation Bias

“Studies of "motivated reasoning"13 show that people who are motivated to reach a particular conclusion are even worse reasoners than those in Kuhn's and Perkins's studies, but the mechanism is basically the s a m e : a one-sided search for supporting evidence only...

Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified...

“the rider—your c o n s c i o u s , reasoning self; a n d he is taking orders from the elephant—your automatic and u n c o n s c i o u s self. T h e two are in c a h o o t s to win at the g a m e of life by playing Machiavellian tit for tat, and both are in denial about it...

To win at this g a m e you m u s t present your best possible self to others.”

Self Comparisons

“W h e n comparing ourselves to others, the general process is this: F r a m e the question (unconsciously, automatically) so that the trait in q u e s t i o n is related to a self-perceived strength, then go out and look for e v i d e n c e that you have the strength...

In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled....

Whenever people form cooperative groups, which are usually of mutual benefit, self-serving biases threaten to fill group m e m b e r s with mutual resentment.”

Naive Realism

“Pronin and Ross trace this resistance to a phenomenon they call "naive realism": Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don't agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies. People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one's insights; for example, being a doctor gives a person special insight into the problems of the health-care industry. But the background of other people is used to explain their biases and covert motivations;...

It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest”

“If I could nominate one candidate for "biggest obstacle to world p e a c e and social harmony," it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right b e c a u s e we see things as they are. T h o s e who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest. Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages' advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.”

“The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism. And it is the ultimate cause of most long-running cycles of violence because both sides use it to lock themselves into a Manichaean struggle”

“In another unsettling conclusion, Baumeister found that violence and cruelty have four main causes. The first two are obvious attributes of evil: greed/ambition (violence for direct personal gain, as in robbery) and sadism (pleasure in hurting people). But greed/ambition explains only a small portion of violence, and sadism explains almost none. Outside of children's car-toons and horror films, people almost never hurt others for the sheer joy of hurting someone. The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. Having high self-esteem doesn't directly cause violence, but when someone's high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people—particularly young men—often lash out violently...

Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission. They want the "good guys" freed by any means, and the "bad guys" convicted by any means...

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun”

Leveraging Repocity and Perception

“That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. T h e s e human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barries Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in t h e m .”

“Feeling Good, a popular guide to cognitive therapy, David Burns has written a chapter on cognitive therapy for anger...

Burns focuses on the should statements we carry around—ideas about how the world should work, and about how people should treat us...

Violations of these should statements are the major c a u s e s of anger and resentment...

Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships...

You can take a small piece of the disagreement and say, "I should not have done X, and I can see why you felt Y." Then, by the power of reciprocity, the other person will likely feel a strong urge to say, "Yes, I was really upset by X. But I guess I shouldn't have done P, so I can see why you felt Q . " Reciprocity amplified by self-serving biases drove you apart back when you were matching insults or hostile gestures, but you can turn the process around and use reciprocity to end a conflict and save a relationship”

“People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game. People have many goals and therefore many sources of pleasure”

Positive Affect

“two types of positive affect. T h e first he calls "pre-goal attainment positive affect," which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. T h e second is called "post-goal attainment positive affect," which Davidson says arises once you .have achieved something you want. In other words, when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer”

The Progress Principle

“the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them...

We are bad at "affective forecasting" that is, predicting how we'll feel in the future. We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions. T h e human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels”

Adaptation Principle

“This is the adaptation principle at work: People's judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed...

Instead of following Buddhist and Stoic advice to surrender attachments and let events happen, we surround ourselves with goals, hopes, and expectations, and then feel pleasure and pain in relation to our progress”

“In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.”

Happiness and Marriage

“Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses. But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence...

a string of objective advantages in power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine—all of which are subject to the adaptation principle”

“Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also b e c a u s e their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures”

“One of the most consistent lessons the ancient sages teach is to let go, stop striving, and choose a new path”

Happiness Formula 

“fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake”

“Conditions include facts about your life that you can't change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to.

Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. B e c a u s e s u c h activities must be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can't just disappear from your awareness the way conditions can.. Voluntary activities, therefore, offer m u c h greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects”

“happiness formula: H = S + C + V”

“Th e level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life ( C ) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.”

“Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It's.worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life...

subjects who thought they had control were more persistent when working on difficult puzzles, but the subjects who had experienced noise without control gave up more easily.. 

changing an institution's environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness...

freed from such a daily burden may lead to a lasting increase in self-confidence and well-being.”

Relationships Importance

“T h e condition that is usually said to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person's relationships. Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people”

“conflicts in relationships is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.”

Flow and Pleasure (fleeting) vs Gratification (fulfilling)

“It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities. T h e keys to flow: There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle)...

In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. T h e elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looking out for problems and opportunities, helping wherever he can...

Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are "delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow... Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency...

the elephant has a tendency to over-indulge, the rider needs to encourage it to get up and move on to another activity. Variety is the spice of life b e c a u s e it is the natural enemy of adaptation. The key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths... and development of a catalog of strengths”

“You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening c o n n e c t i o n s — h e l p i n g friends, e x p r e s s i n g gratitude to benefactors...

Performing a random act of kindness every day could get tedious, but if you know your strengths a n d draw up a list of five activities that engage them, you can surely a d d at least o n e gratification to every day ...

choose your own gratifying activities, do them regularly (but not to the point of tedium), and raise your overall level of h a p p i n e s s”

“Evolution s e e m s to have m a d e us "strategically irrational" at times for our own good”

“another kind of irrationality: the vigor with which people pursue many goals that work against their o w n h a p p i n e s s.

Happiness and Consumerism

“Inconspicuous consumption, on the other hand, refers to goods and activities that are valued for themselves, that are usually consumed more privately, and that are not bought for the purpose of achieving status”

“experiences give more happiness in part b e c a u s e they have greater social value..

The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious...

The pursuit of luxury g o o d s is a happiness trap; it is a d e a d end that people race toward in the mistaken belief that it will make them h a p p y”

Paradox of Choice

" psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the "paradox of choice"...

We value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness. But Schwartz and his colleagues find that the paradox mostly applies to people they call "maximizers"—those who habitually try to evaluate all the options, seek out more information, and make the best choice (or "maximize their utility," as economists would say)...

Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety...

T h e point here is that maximizers engage in more social comparison, and are therefore more easily drawn into conspicuous consumption.”

“cybernetics—the study of how mechanical and biological systems can regulate themselves to achieve preset goals while the environment around and inside them changes.”

Attachment Theory and Childhood Development

“Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children's behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life...

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own...

he observed mothers at home and found that those who were warm and highly responsive to their children were most likely to have children who showed secure attachment in the strange situation. These children had learned that they could count on their mothers, and were therefore the most bold and confident. Mothers who were aloof and unresponsive were more likely to have avoidant children, who had learned not to expect much help and comfort from mom. Mothers whose responses were erratic and unpredictable were more likely to have resistant children, who had learned that their efforts to elicit comfort sometimes paid off, but sometimes not.

My skepticism is bolstered by the fact that studies done after Ainsworth's h o m e study have generally found only small correlations between mothers' responsiveness and the attachment style of their children.18”

No one event is particularly important, but over lime the child builds up what Bowlby called an "internal working m o d e l " of himself, his mother, and their relationship. If the model says that m o m is always there for you, you'll be bolder in your play and explorations. Round after round, predictable and reciprocal interactions build trust and strengthen the relationship

“fake one ancient attachment system, mix with an equal m e a s u r e of caregiving system, throw in a modified mating system and voila, that's romantic love”

Myth of True Love: Passionate vs Companionate Love

“As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever”

30 December 2016

“According to the love researchers Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, passionate love is a "wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.

“Berscheid and Walster define c o m p a n i o n a t e love, in contrast, as "the affection we feel for those with w h o m our lives are deeply intertwined.

“C o m p a n i o n a t e love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely u p o n , care for, and trust e a c h other”

“If the m e t a p h o r for passionate love is fire, I he m e t a p h o r for c o m p a n i o n a t e love is vines growing, intertwining, a n d gradually binding two people together”

“At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.”

“So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it's like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses).”

“The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Short Run) ding”

“True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other..

But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the p a n”

“The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Long Run”

“The Laws of Manu, an ancient Hindu treatise on how young Brahmin men should live, was even more negative about women: "It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth.”

Philosophy of Love

“I have never seen anyone who loved virtue as much as sex.

For Plato, when human love resembles animal love, it is degrading. The love of a man for a woman, as it aims at procreation, is therefore a debased kind of love.”

“The essential nature of love as an attachment between two people is rejected; love can be dignified only when it is converted into an appreciation of beauty in general”

“Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words:- caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word "charity") is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person

There are several reasons why real human love might make philosophers uncomfortable. First, passionate love is notorious for making people illogical and irrational, and Western philosophers have long thought that morality is grounded in rationality...

The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality”

Morality and Social ties

“The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests...

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. It's not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood. Even people who think they don't want a lot of social contact still benefit from it.”

Freedom from Social Norms

“An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous b e c a u s e it encourages people to leave h o m e s , jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment...

S e n e c a was right: " N o one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility...

We are an ultrasocial s p e c i e s , full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others. Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit said, "Hell is other people."57 But so is heaven.”

The Adversity Hypothesis: Benefit from Adversity

“although traumas, crises, and tragedies c o m e in a thousand forms, people benefit from them in three primary ways..

rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your s e l f - c o n c e p t . N o n e of us knows what we are really capable of enduring...

h e second class of benefit concerns relationships. Adversity is a filter.

“When a person is diagnosed with cancer, or a couple loses a child, some friends and family members rise to the occasion and look for any way they can to express support or to be helpful. Others turn away, perhaps unsure of what to say or unable to overcome their own discomfort with the situation.

But adversity doesn't just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people's hearts to one another. We often develop love for those we care for, and we usually feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us in a time of need. ...

Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present ("Live each day to the fullest") and toward other people...

T h e reality that people often wake up to is that life is a gift they have b e e n taking for granted, and that people matter m o r e than money...

The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement...

T h e weak version is well-supported by research, but it has few clear implications for how we should live our lives. The strong version of the hypothesis is m o r e unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have laced and overcome great adversity. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats...

It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the "critical incidents" that would h e l p them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It m e a n s that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people's expectations rise so high that they sue each other for "emotional damages.”

#thehappinesshypothesis #happiness #depression #humannature

[sherristockman]

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in ‘Healthy’ Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Are you eating a healthy, whole food diet yet still struggle with weight gain and health problems? Part of the problem might have to do with lectins. Dr. Steven Gundry,1 author of "The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in 'Healthy' Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain," makes a strong case for a lectin-free diet. While trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon, Gundry now specializes in treating patients holistically, focusing on food. He's been director of The International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine for the past 17 years. Before that, he was a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health, where he invented devices that reverse cell death associated with acute heart attacks. He's also been a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the Loma Linda School of Medicine and chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Loma University Medical Center. I read about 150 books per year, most of which relate to health. Many of these books I can read in less than an hour, because they're just saying the same old thing. Gundry's bookis not one of those. It's a great resource filled with novel information. What Are Lectins? Download Interview Transcript From an evolutionary standpoint, any creature, including plants, has a built-in imperative to grow, thrive and propagate. Plants, being rooted into the ground, cannot outrun a predatory insect. Instead, plants use chemistry for self-defense. One of the plant kingdom's self-defense systems is lectins — not to be confused with lecithin or leptin. Lectins are plant proteins, sometimes called sticky proteins or glyca-binding proteins, because they seek out and bind to certain sugar molecules on the surface of cells. There are many types of lectins, and the main difference between them is the type of sugar each prefers and binds to. Some — including wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), found in wheat and other grass-family seeds — bind to specific receptor sites on your intestinal mucosal cells and interfere with the absorption of nutrients across your intestinal wall. As such, they act as "antinutrients," and can have a detrimental effect on your gut microbiome by shifting the balance of your bacterial flora — a common precursor to leaky gut. "I like to think of it as they hack into our communication system, or any predator's communication system," Gundry says. "For instance, in insects, they attack a sugar called sialic acid which, among other things, sits between the endings of nerves. One nerve talks to the other nerve by acetylcholine jumping through that space. Sialic acid allows that to happen. Lectins bind to sialic acid and so interrupt nerve transmission. If you think about it, paralyzing an insect is a great defense system because if the insect can't move, bingo, you've solved the problem. One of the things I've learned through the years through my patients is we're just a giant insect to a plant. What may happen to an insect fairly instantaneously by eating some plant lectins may take years in us, who are giant insects, to manifest. It may manifest as neuropathy, it may manifest as brain fog, arthritis or heart disease. But the longer I do this, the more I'm convinced that almost every disease process … can be traced back to … plant lectins. That's a long-winded explanation for how plants don't like us. They absolutely don't want to be eaten. They've had 400 million years to work out defense systems — a really long time." The Role of Your Microbiome One of the things that struck me about Gundry's approach is that it targets the mitochondria and the microbiome, both of which are vital for optimal health. Few physicians, even those in the integrative medicine field, fully understand the importance of mitochondrial function, but Gundry certainly does. And, while the human genome has received a majority of the scientific attention, the bacterial microbiome genome is actually far more important. As noted by Gundry: "Our microbiome is, I think, our early warning system, because about 99 percent of all the genes that make up [the human body] are actually nonhuman, they're bacterial, viral and fungal … [from which] we've uploaded most of the information about interacting with our environment … because the microbiome is capable of almost instantaneous changing and information processing that we actually don't have the ability to do. We're beginning to realize … that the microbiome is not only how we interact with plant materials … like lectins, but probably more importantly, our microbiome teaches our immune system whether a particular plant compound is a friend or foe [based on] how long we've known that plant compound. There are lectins in everything. But the longer we've interacted with lectins and the longer our microbiome has interacted with them, the more our microbiome kind of tells our immune system, 'Hey, guys, it's cool. We've known these guys for 40 million years. Chill out. They're a pain, but we can handle them.' From an evolutionary perspective, if you look at modern foods — say the grains and the beans, which we started interacting with 10,000 years ago, which is a blink of time — our microbiome [regards them as] foreign substances … [T]here's no lectin speed dating in evolution." The Importance of Mitochondrial Function With regard to mitochondria, "mitochondrial flexibility is one of the unique things that make us human," Gundry says, comparing the human race to a "fat-storing ape." Whether you ascribe to the evolutionary theory or not, humans and apes have many genetic similarities, but the ability to store fat is a unique human feature. No other great apes can do that. Chimps, gorillas and orangutans carry 3 percent body fat. Few humans could ever achieve that low of a body fat percentage unless we were near death from starvation. "The reason we're designed to [store fat is to] be able to access fat for fuel," Gundry says. "The reason why [humans] have been able to take over all parts of the world … [is] because we can cycle back and forth, having our mitochondria use fat for fuel or glucose for fuel. We're designed to shift very quickly … even within 24 hours. [Most people] no longer have that metabolic flexibility [because] we've been constantly bombarding our mitochondria with an overload of glucose as a fuel, and that really underlies, I think, most disease processes." How Intermittent Fasting Boosts Mitochondrial Flexibility One of the strategies Gundry recommends and uses to improve his own metabolic flexibility is intermittent fasting. For nearly a decade now, he's been fasting for 22 hours a day, five days a week, from January through June 1, which means he eats all his calories for the day during a two-hour window. On the weekends, he eats lunch and dinner. "I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat lunch. I eat my calories between 6 and 8 o'clock at night. I do that because my wife and I are at home at that time. If I was really smart, I would [eat] earlier in the day, but, you know, you've got to be practical in one way or another … In summer, I'll have a smoothie with some MCT oil in it, half an avocado, some romaine lettuce, spinach, half a lemon and a little bit of vanilla or stevia. Then I won't eat lunch. At dinner, same sort of thing, I try to pack all of my calories in between 6 and 8 o'clock at night … [June 1], I finished my winter fast, if you will. Now, why do I do that? [Historically], food was a rare thing to find [during the winter]. Again, our metabolic advantage is we're really good at starvation. It's what allowed us to survive. We know that during food scarcity, not only do our mitochondria rev up, but more importantly, our entire immune system and genetic monitoring basically says, 'Look, times are tough. We don't know when the next good food supply is going to come. We've got to make it through to that next period. We're going to look at every cell in our body. We're going to look at whether they're pulling their own weight. Are they odd? Are they not very fuel-efficient? We're going to jettison that. We're going to create apoptosis until these cells commit suicide.' It's kind of like if we were in a hot air balloon and we're heading for the mountain and we're going to crash, we've got to start throwing things overboard to get more lift. I think that's a fundamental principle that you've known for a number of years and that I've certainly preached for a number of years. The more we understand that that's how successful aging occurs and study successful agers, one of the things that's fascinating, particularly in an animal model, is that this intermittent fasting, this challenging [your mitochondria], is the way to do it." Although I used to do 14- to 16-hour intermittent fasts, because I felt that it was wise to increase glycogen stores prior to strength training, I have come to realize that's not true. In fact, it's counterproductive, as carbs after strength training can increase insulin and diminish IGF-1 response and blunt the anabolic stimulus. So now I am fasting for 18 to 20 hours a day and do all my strength training in a fasted state. That may sound challenging, but I can confidently assure you, from personal experience, that once you are fat adapted there are no cravings. Additionally, I recently interviewed Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book "The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cogntive Decline," in which he discusses how ApoE4 is a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's but ONLY if you don't intermittent fast. If you do, it will likely actually decrease your risk for the disease as its biological function is to allow us to go for longer periods of time without food. The Importance of Ketogenic Cycling Gundry also understands the importance of cycling in and out of nutritional ketosis. While your body is still burning sugar as its primary fuel, you'll want to be quite strict about not going over your net carb allotment. But once your body has regained the metabolic flexibility to burn fat, it's really important to cycle in and out or on and off. I suggest doubling, tripling or even quadrupling your net carbs two days a week, because the metabolic "magic" actually happens during the refeeding phase. As noted by Gundry: "You have to look at it evolutionarily. It really was feast or famine. When we hit large amounts of food, whether it was a fruit tree or whether it was honey or a wildebeest or a mastodon, there was no food storage system. People tend to forget that nobody walked out of their cave and said, 'What's for breakfast?' There was no refrigerator to have organic berries in every day. When we chanced upon fuel, then our beautiful design [allowed us to] eat large quantities of [food] and store it as fat. Because, very shortly, whether it was a period of drought, whether it was a period of winter, we were going to regress. I'd like people to think of circadian rhythms. Obviously, we have a 24-hour clock. We have a moon clock. We have seasonal clocks. What I like people to think of is that we have a period of every year where [we're in] a growth cycle … That's the time of growth and it's a time to reproduce. Then there's a time of involution, whether it's a tree dropping its leaves, whether it's an animal hibernating. That's the time where we kind of take stock of everything. That yin and yang, that flow that would happen every year on seasonal basis has completely been lost. We have to have periods where we consume excess calories, then we have to have periods where the exact opposite happens. Years ago, after my first book came out, I was invited to Phoenix, Arizona, by a blogger named John Kiefer. Kiefer said you should burn fat for fuel most of the time. But every week, you should have what's called "carb nite loading." He chanced upon this by accident, but he made a career out of it. I picked his brain and he picked my brain. I think he's absolutely right." Lectins Are Strongly Associated With Autoimmune Diseases of All Kinds Since we just talked about carb-loading at least once or twice a week (once you've regained the ability to burn fat for fuel), it's worth stressing that these ought to be healthy carbohydrates, and ideally lectin-free. While intermittent fasting and eating a ketogenic (high-fat, low-carb, moderate protein) diet will dramatically reduce your risk of chronic disease, lectins may still cause trouble. One of the primary issues is autoimmune diseases. "One of the things I talk about in the book that really made me hyper-focused on lectins was a friend of mine who was a very early adopter of my first program. I call him Tony in the book. Tony had really bad vitiligo. That's … where the [skin] pigmentation is lost. Vitiligo is an autoimmune disease. What happens is we attack the pigment-forming cells in our skin called melanocytes. Melanocytes are actually modified neural cells. They migrate from the neural crest to our skin in embryonic development. When Tony started my program, a few months later, he came up to visit me. He said, 'You're not going to believe this. My vitiligo is gone.' I'm looking at him and I'm going, 'Wow. That's impressive.' He said, 'How did that happen?' I could have said, 'Well, this is a very anti-inflammatory diet. It's high in antioxidants.' But because I'm a researcher, I said, 'No. That's too simple.' I said, 'Melanocytes. Neural Cells. What's the target of lectins in insects? Neural cells! Could it be that lectins are why [his body is] attacking his neural cells? What I've done is I've removed lectins from his diet.' I lost track of him for a number of years. I was on a health panel in New York City two years ago. I saw him and he's covered with vitiligo again. I said, 'What happened?' He says, 'You know. I fell off [the diet]. I really need to get back on.' I said, 'This is a great experiment. Come on. Here's the list. Go for it.' We were just on a panel at Harvard two months ago. He's chairing the panel. He says, 'I've got to show you — everybody — the vitiligo's gone because I took lectins back out of my diet. It sounds silly but here's the proof.'" Molecular Mimicry One way by which lectins cause harm is through molecular mimicry. They resemble proteins in the thyroid gland, in your joint spaces and in nerves. They mimic myelin sheath proteins. The reason why lectins will in one person cause vitiligo or psoriasis, and in another attack the thyroid or cause rheumatoid arthritis, is still unknown. What is known is that one of the underlying factors in all of these disease processes is the penetration of the gut wall by lectins and their co-travelers, lipopolysaccharides (LPSs), also known as endotoxins, which tend to elicit very strong immune responses. "One of the things I found in all my autoimmune patients is they had profoundly low levels of vitamin D … Interestingly, when you finally seal the gut … all of a sudden, their vitamin D levels went sky high and I could back down on the dosage. Vitamin D is essential to tell the stem cells at the bottom of the crypts in the villi to grow and divide. Without vitamin D stimulating them, they just sit there and don't repair the gut. I think plants are so intelligent, it's shocking. I think one of the plant strategies is that if you have low vitamin D, because you can't absorb it, then you can't repair your gut. You're a horrible predator. You won't reproduce. You won't walk. Vitamin D is really one of the keys to autoimmune disease. Lectins are the other key. I've been blessed by knowing thousands of autoimmune patients who I call "canaries," because they react almost instantaneously to lectins. It's interesting. Everybody has their own certain lectin or lectins that they really react to. This morning I had a woman who has rheumatoid arthritis. Her rheumatoid markers or anti-CCP3 markers have gone up. Her IL-17 had gone up. I said, 'All right. What are you doing? What's going on?' She said, 'No, no. I'm perfect. I know your list backwards and forwards.' I said, 'No. There's something.'" A Sample Case History of Crohn's Disease As it turns out, she's been eating raw (unpeeled) almonds, and almond peels contain lectins. Another patient's markers went up after going on a cashew binge, forgetting that cashews are an American bean and hence high in lectins. The answer for autoimmune patients, Gundry says, is to remove lectins from the diet and add vitamin D, which together will help "heal and seal" the gut, thereby preventing the autoimmune response. "I mention a young woman who has Crohn's disease in the book. Her well-meaning doctor at the Mayo Clinic told her that food had nothing to do with Crohn's disease. She had been cured of Crohn's disease with my program. He told her it was the placebo effect. We still laugh at that one. She ate a couple of Christmas cookies after she got off the phone with him. Of course, it was like throwing a bomb in her stomach. She had horrible cramps and diarrhea. We skyped and she said, 'Why don't doctors see this?' Like I talk about in the book, we can't see unless our eyes are open … I was lucky enough that when I met the guy who changed my life, Big Ed, who cleaned out his arteries with diet and supplements, [I had] my eyes open. I said, 'This is not chance. How did [he] do this?' Luckily, because of my evolutionary background, I was able to piece it together." Which Foods Have the Most Problematic Lectins? Lectins are found in many of our most cherished foods, such as: 2,3 ✓ Potatoes ✓ Eggplants ✓ Tomatoes ✓ Peppers ✓ Goji berries ✓ Lima beans ✓ Cashews ✓ Peanuts ✓ Sunflower seeds ✓ Chia seeds ✓ Pumpkin seeds ✓ Kidney beans ✓ Squash ✓ Corn ✓ Quinoa ✓ Soybeans ✓ Wheat ✓ Lentils Another common lectin is the A1 casein protein, found in most of today's dairy cows. I've talked a lot about the benefits of raw milk on my site. The devil's in the details however, and aside from being high in sugar, even raw dairy may cause problems if it has A1 casein. "Casein A2 is the normal protein in milk, besides whey. It's present in sheep, goats and water buffalos. But, most of the cows in the world are now casein A1 producers. They make a lectin-like protein called casein A1, which is metabolized in our gut to make beta-casomorphin, which is a very interesting thing. They can attach to the beta cell of the pancreas and incite an autoimmune attack on the pancreas. I and others are pretty convinced that [many cases] of Type 1 juvenile diabetics is because of the casein A1 in milk. I've been convinced through the years that not only is it the problem, but people who think they're lactose intolerant or that milk gives them mucus, it's the casein A1 … Raw milk is great, as long as it came from the right cow … [Some] Jerseys are A1 and [some are] A2. Holsteins are A1." More and more people are now starting to recognize this, and there are even grassroots movements pushing for A2 milk in California and Ohio. Jeni's Ice Cream gets all her milk from Snowville Creamery, which is an A2 farm. "I've actually talked to those people. They get it," Gundry says. There have even been attempts to introduce A2 milk on a larger scale, but each attempt has been crushed by the American Dairy Council, for obvious reasons. Wheat — Going Beyond Gluten Wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) is another problematic lectin, found in wheat. Compared to WGA, gluten is a minor problem. According to Gundry, WGA is one of the most efficient ways to induce heart disease in experimental animals. WGA binds to insulin receptor sites. Normally, a normal hormone will dock on a receptor site, give its information and then release. Pseudo hormones like WGA, on the other hand, dock on the receptor permanently. Gundry explains: "If they hit the insulin receptor on a fat cell, they turn on lipoprotein lipase and pump sugar into the fat cell, turning it into fat constantly. In muscle cells, the exact opposite happens. They'll attach to the insulin receptor in the muscle cell [and] block insulin from delivering sugar into the cell. I see so many long-distance runners who are carboholics, who look like concentration camp survivors because they're really cachectic and sarcopenic because they block the insulin receptors in their muscles … The lectins, like WGA and galactans in beans are miraculous ways of making us store fat … [T]he only way we've ever been able to fatten an animal for slaughter is to give them grains, beans and some antibiotics. If that's how we fatten animals, that's how we fatten us. It works really well." Not All Bread Is the Same If you've ever traveled to Europe, you may have indulged in some bread and noticed you didn't experience the same type of problems you have when eating bread in the U.S. The reason for this is because the lectins are removed when you use traditional methods of raising bread, which is still popular in Europe. "Europe [has] always used traditional methods raising bread. They use yeast or sourdough. Yeast and bacteria are actually pretty good at breaking down the gluten molecule and other lectins," Gundry explains. Europe also does not permit the use of glyphosate to desiccate wheat, which has become common practice in the U.S. Glyphosate is also used on many conventional grains, including beans and flax, so it's in the animal meats we eat, it's in our baked goods, and even in wine produced in the U.S. According to Gundry, glyphosate potentiates gluten to people who are not even gluten-sensitive, and interferes with your liver's ability to manufacture the active form of vitamin D. Glyphosate also chelates important minerals, disrupts the shikimate pathway, decimates your microbiome and increases leaky gut, which allows more of the LPSs into your bloodstream. Since it works synergistically with the lectins, it really delivers a double-whammy. "[Glyphosate] hits cytochrome P450. It's one of the reasons the Europeans are so far [ahead] on health," Gundry says. "It's one of the reasons why so many of my patients can go to Europe, eat their traditional diet and think they're cured and now they can start eating bread. They come back and eat a piece of bread and, bam — the whole thing starts all over again." On Vegetarianism and Other Diets As mentioned, Gundry was a professor at Loma Linda University, a Seventh Day Adventist facility. Seventh Day Adventists are typically vegetarians, and while not an Adventist, Gundry did eat a vegetarian diet for about 15 years during his time there. "I've never been sicker in my life. I used to weigh 228 pounds despite running 30 miles a week and running half marathons on the weekend and going to the gym one hour every day, wondering why I had high blood pressure, prediabetes and heart disease … Quite frankly, we have a fabulous orthopedic department at Loma Linda, because grains are pretty doggone mischievous for that. Through the years, I've been good friends with the head of the Adventist Health Studies, a cardiologist. One of the things I've learned from following the Adventists and following Gary Fraser is that … certain animal proteins do contribute to aging. In the Adventist health study, the vegan Adventists have the longest life span. Behind them are the lacto-ovo vegetarians, then behind them are the pescetarians. Then finally, there are the real cheaters who eat chicken … It is interesting that the longest living of the Adventists, who are very long-living, are the vegans. I take care of a lot of vegans because of my association with Loma Linda. As a general rule, the vegans are some of the unhealthiest people I have met. The reason is they're grain- and bean-itarians. They are not vegetable eaters. I have nothing against a high vegetable diet … The other thing we see in the vegans is they somehow think they will convert short-chain omega-3 fats into EPA, the long-chain omega-3 fats. They absolutely and positively do not. Our brain is about 70 percent fat; 50 percent of that fat is DHA. There are beautiful longitudinal studies showing people with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains as they age, and the largest areas of memory in the hippocampus. People with the lowest levels of omega-3 index have the most shrunken brains and the smallest areas of memory. Vegans have no excuse anymore. There's algae-based DHA." Fruit and Berries — Seasonal Treats Gundry's first rule is that what you stop eating is more important than what you start eating. "It's absolutely true," he says. "If you take away certain foods, you'll be amazed [to find] that it's certain foods that are the troublemakers." His second rule is, take care of your gut microbiome. Rule No. 3 is "fruit might be as good as candy." While he doesn't expound on the importance of burning fat for fuel in his book, that's really part of the equation. Once you're able to burn fat, fruit can be a healthy carbohydrate to add once or twice a week. "Exactly. I think part of the problem is the vast majority of Americans are insulin-resistant. One of the things that people should realize is that the modern fruit has been bred for sugar content … One of the things I ask people to do initially is give fruit the boot. Fructose is a major toxin. We take fructose directly to our liver and detoxify it into triglycerides and uric acid. It always amazes me the number of people with gout who consume more concentrated fruit, like wine or beer. Beer is one of the underlying reasons that they have gout. The other thing people should realize is that fructose is a direct renal toxin. The more fructose I can get out of people, the better. Having said that, once you get to a point where you have metabolic flexibility, I think things like berries are probably one of the best ways to carbohydrate load on the day you decided to do that … Sweet potatoes are great as well, [and] I'm a big fan of taro root. Years ago [in June] … my wife and I were at a Santa Barbara farmers market. I was taking these gorgeous organic peaches and putting them into my bag. She says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Aren't you the guy who says give fruit the boot?' I said, 'Yeah, yeah. But it's June and it's time to eat fruit.' She says, 'OK, smart guy. Let's do this. This summer, we're going to give up fruit to see what happens' … So, we gave up fruit for one summer. We didn't change anything else in our diet. My wife lost 6 pounds and I lost 8 pounds. It brought home to me that, again, our ancestors and the reason we have two-thirds of our tongue devoted to sweet taste is we are great fruit predators. Fruit was only available once a year. We utilized that fruit to gain weight for the winter … [Now] we can have it 365 days a year, but that's not normal. So, always keep that in mind." More Information To learn more, I highly recommend picking up a copy of "The Plant Paradox," especially if you've already cleaned up your diet and still struggle with excess weight and/or health problems. Certainly, anyone with an autoimmune disorder would be wise to take a closer look at lectins. It's really vital information that can help optimize your health, and that of your family. It's a great read, with the perfect balance between science and practical recommendations. If you've been following the "Fat for Fuel" approach, it's just a minor tweak. But it's a very important tweak that I wish I would have known about earlier. If I had, I would have dedicated a chapter to lectins in my book. I will however incorporate this information in my "Fat for Fuel Cookbook," which will be published this fall.

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