Is it five or more senses?

Did you know that we have more than five senses (hearing, taste, sight, touch and smell)? Each of these senses has organs that have special receptors to take in specific stimuli, we know them intimately as our ears, our tongue, our eyes, our skin and our nose.  The other senses outside of these five you probably do know but you just haven’t really thought about it.

So...think about the last time you went to the bathroom, was it because you felt an urge to purge or you just went for no reason. Most likely the sensors in your rectum or bladder noted a certain pressure being exerted upon those organs and got you off your duff to go expel the waste your body had accumulated. This is the purge sense, bet you never thought it was a sense but if you are like me i don't think you would ever want to be without it.

We all get hungry and thirsty and those senses are pretty self explanatory. You can’t go too long without having to eat or drink, if you did ignore these two you would certainly put your body at risk. Some of you may say Hey! These could be lumped under taste, but taste doesn't make you eat. Just tasting something is vastly different from tasting something because you are hungry or drinking something because you are dying of thirst. The hungry and thirst comes first before the taste and that usually stems from activity inside your body not your tongue.

The sense of pain is another sense that goes under a special label called nociception. Nociceptors detect mechanical, thermal or chemical changes above a set threshold and send signals along the spine to your brain. Without these wonderful nociceptors there would be nothing to tell you to stop inflicting pain to your body and nothing to notify you that you have pain in your body and you should probably start tending to it. The sense of pain saves you from yourself, something i think we can all relate to.

So look outside...today is a pretty hot day for those of us in the islands, most of us try to avoid being outside under the sun for prolonged periods of time. If we are outside we usually spend some time trying to cool off either in the ocean, a pool or under a hose. If not doing that we are not outside at all and are hiding inside a building with AC or fans or limin under a shade tree. Somehow we all try to cool down to keep our body temperature at a comfortable level.  If we were in a cold climate we would be doing the opposite to warm up our bodies. Thermoception is another one of those senses we don’t think about as being a sense but if we didn’t have it we would probably do serious damage to our bodies if we couldn’t recognize excess temperature ranges.

Have you ever had that sense of toppling over but catching yourself in time and managing to maintain your balance? Well equilibrioception or the sense of balance is what keeps you standing upright whether you are standing still or moving. Three systems, the eyes, ears and the bodies sense of where it is in space operate together to keep you vertical. Without these you would have difficulty moving around and would have to be trained to overcome any lack of one of these three. The sense of balance helps us everyday as we navigate our world on two feet.

Knowing where your body is and what it is doing is also a sense. You always know what your body is doing in relation to itself unless you have some underlying kinesthetic deficit. Anything you do with your body like taking a piece of food and putting it in your mouth, or reaching over and picking something up or even driving involves the nervous system and its ability to keep your body functioning without actively watching it. Closing your eyes and putting your finger to your nose is a good demonstration of this sense. Your body knows how to find your nose without looking. It always knows where you are.

According to some of the things i have been reading we really have between 9 and 20 separate senses depending on which sense researcher you follow. Time, itchiness, internal perception, a host of touch and eye senses etc. are all considered respectable groups that deserve their own studies. Who knows maybe extra sensory perception will some day be listed among those for more serious consideration. Anyway if you are still stuck believing that we only have five senses maybe you don’t need to go to the bathroom and have toppled off your chair taking the computer with you.

See ya next week.

God complex

Tim Harford has a talk up on TED that highlights the difference between the “god complex”, that affliction that we usually ascribe to someone who consistently asserts that their opinion is automatically above those with whom they may disagree, and the practical use of trial and error.

When i went to look up a more concise definition of the god complex i found myself having a huge belly laugh because the last sentence of the description said that the term god complex does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; made me wonder if it might someday be found there.

The problem with the god complex is that no matter how complicated a problem is if you have an infallible belief that you are right you could be really wrong. This means that you eliminate all consideration for alternative roads to a mutually beneficial result because you are right and everyone else hasn't a clue. i would imagine all of us could find ourselves exhibiting god complex characteristics at some point during our lives.

Tim talks about the problems with trying to do anything using a defined set of criteria that does not involve trial and error. He claims that without trial and error nothing can be created. He advises us that the world is so complex there is no right answer but many answers and that it is imperative to use some humility when getting to those answers.

His dream is to have teachers work with children not only to get the right answer but to acknowledge our ignorance and to teach them that you don’t always know the answer. He claims that trial and error are the very philosophy of the universe.

He goes on to reflect on problems. When we encounter a problem and that problem is complex then you will need a complex solution. Trial and error gives you the courage and willingness to pursue different courses of action understanding that you might be wrong initially but eventually you may find the correct answer or solution.

Having an absolute belief that your way is the only way can lead to enormous mistakes. Resistance to change is not always beneficial to the final outcome. Learning from mistakes the way chemists did when they finally hit upon the strategy for making antibiotics changed health care as we know it.  The chemists learned from their original failures, they modified their experiments and tried again and again and again until they reached their goals.

Today in the political arena we have a lot of god complex types running roughshod over our economy. They don’t seem to understand that they represent all of us, the wealthy, the corporations, the middle class and the poor. They haven’t set out any future goals that impact all of us positively.

The surplus that Clinton left is GONE, the temporary tax holiday to use up the surplus has pushed us into recession. Taxes need to be reinstated; more tax holidays will not improve our condition. The god complex belief that a lower tax creates jobs needs to find its place in the trash heap of bad ideas, its time to move on as a nation and try a different method. These guys running the show today are going to ruin the country if we don’t stop them and it is you the little guy who will feel it more than the big guys.

Booman over at booman tribune had this to say yesterday.

The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have reduced the revenues taken in by the treasury by slightly more than the cost of the ten-year war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, if we hadn't cut taxes early in the last decade, we could have paid for those wars completely. On the other hand, if we hadn't committed either blunder, we'd have nearly three trillion dollars to pay down the debt or make investments in our country. What's going on now is an aggressive effort to make middle class people pay for the wars, with interest included. If rich people had paid their taxes over the past decade, we wouldn't be in this position. What we're doing today is filling the hole created by Bush's tax cuts. So, for example, we're going to cut spending on education and transportation and research to make up for the fact that Steve Forbes didn't pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes over the last ten years.

So Stop supporting bad ideas. 

Reducing taxes does not produce jobs.

Spending cuts do not produce jobs, they eliminate jobs.

Trickle down is really trickle up.

See ya next week.

Dishonoring Greed

i want to dishonor greed. For too long in our society the “greed is good” slogan has been bandied about. It is actually a shortened version out of the movie “Wall Street." The character, Gordon Gekko, states that “greed for lack of a better word, is good.” This slogan has been applied to an aspect of the American Dream that covets a vast accumulation of wealth, status and power. Dishonoring of greed means discussing where that can lead.

According to Plato “The man who is under the despotism of a master passion (fill in the blank) is the unhappiest by three tests of well-being: freedom, wealth, and security from fear. His unlimited license to “do what he likes” is not a genuine freedom.” As he and his fellow wealthy accumulate more and more the disparity between their great wealth and that of their countrymen leads towards an oligarchic state where the wealthy control the reins of government.

For the greedy man his pleasure is illusory because he is always consumed with want and fear. Want for what his wealthy neighbors have and fear that someone might take what he already accumulated away from him. To control the fear and want he must be at all times in control of his environment and either in control of government or sufficiently connected be able to influence political outcomes.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his speech "The Children of Gordon Gekko" concerning the Financial crisis of 2007-2010 stated “It is perhaps time now to admit that we did not learn the full lessons of the greed-is-good ideology. Today we are still cleaning up the mess of the 21st-century children of Gordon Gekko.

In order to hang onto wealth, the wealthy have to manipulate the common man to emulate the greed is good mantra. Most of us will never reach the echelons of wealth that the 1% enjoy but the thought that maybe some of us could creates a garden of ideas the wealthy have been watering for 30 years now. Today some of the failing middle class are waking up to the fact that those 1% are just getting wealthier while the rest of the country has stagnated or gone backwards.

There is no way to be greedy without exploiting others. There is no such thing as good greed and if you are religious you are well acquainted with the fact that greed is one of the 7 deadly sins. Greed does not find peace; it is the catalyst for war and today it is becoming more about a class war than a nation united.

Plato discusses the disparity in wealth as a decline of society where the rich are in control and the poor man can not attain public office. We are seeing this now all over the country, where only those with sizable fortune’s can even run for office. As the wealth flows upwards the powerful exert more influence (Citizens United) to keep that wealth while virtue suffers. They despise the poor man, they ridicule and demean him while promoting the rich who enjoy all the praise and admiration. Eventually as Plato describes there is a limiting of privilege in this kind of society which we can certainly recognize through the debates about health care, education and government jobs.

Getting involved in believing that greed is good means you will loose sight of how you are taking advantage of others. You will put on blinders so that the advantage is minimized. Empathy will become a dirty word and compassion will be executed in measured doses.

There is something perverse about more than enough. When we have more, it is never enough. It is always somewhere out there, just out of reach. The more we acquire, the more elusive enough becomes. –Unknown

When honest people are thrown out of work, as they have been in Wisconsin and other states, because the hoarders don’t want to pay taxes to support schools, policeman, firemen etc., it is time to re-evaluate why 1% of our population is hoarding 40% of the nations wealth.  These values of self interest and greed are contributing to the bad economy we all are experiencing.

When the elderly are threatened with not getting their Social Security checks we have gone over the top. When are we going to open our eyes and ask why the wealthy can’t pay a little bit more?

Some have gone so far as to refer to the “Free Market” as the “Greed Market.” i just want to know when people are going to wake up and start looking out for their interests and not those of the wealthy.

raise the deficit ceiling

Dear Friends,

Future investigators, trundling through all the mess we have left behind will wonder why we weren’t out there demanding accountability and a change away from all which ails us.

Last week i wrote that we are not as set in our ways as we think, we can change and we can come out of the fog of propaganda.

After the last Great Depression the country woke up and started to invest in itself. Those who had been voted in (even though wealthy in their own right) realized that the wealth concentrated in the top two percent was not good for the country as a whole. Taxes went up, public works were implemented to put people back to work and the economy started to stabilize as more citizens could afford to spend.

Today we have a group in Congress that won’t raise revenue to pay off debts that they created by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and engaging in two wars they kept off the books. Their idea is to shrink government while putting more and more people out of jobs. How this can be viewed as beneficial to the economy when it is contracting is beyond me.

Propaganda is all about successful liars revealing considerable truth in what they say, but also sufficient untruths to cause the listener confusion about what the reality really is. Today too many believe that the deficit is our main problem. Its not, jobs are our real problem and neither party has come up with any ideas concerning a solution.

The Independent has a piece up in their science section that declares wide faced men more prone to lie. Professor Haselhuhn said.

"Importantly, we found evidence that the link between men's facial ratio and their unethical behavior is caused by a sense of power. Men with larger facial ratios feel more powerful, and this sense of power then leads them to act unethically. Our findings suggest that some men are simply predisposed to act unethically in order to achieve their goals.”

Well duh and i don’t think it has one bit to do with how wide a man’s face is. They had a picture up of Nixon as an example of a wide faced man and suggested that you should examine the width of any salesman’s face before you buy something from him because he could be lying.

Men and women lie to achieve power over others, those who believe the lie to be true become accomplices in manipulations that may be detrimental to their lives. Today many in this country are blindsided by the BIG LIE, the worst kind of lie which tricks the victim into believing something about the country and its government that can be contradicted by information they have access to but refuse to embrace.

The big lie today is if we default all we have to do is pay the interest on the loans. Wrong, no one in government signed on to interest only loans, the contracts are for interest and principal and if you were holding the loans you would not like a reduction in your payments. Reducing the payment is defaulting and defaulting could have negative repercussions all over the world, including your savings and investments. Supporting this crazy scheme puts us all at risk.

i read an example last week on line that used credit cards to explain the deficit. Say your card should max out at $5,000 dollars but you spent over your limit and now you owe $7,000. How much should you pay back $5,000 or $7,000? If you answered $7,000 you are correct. You owe all the money even though it is above your limit. You and no one else is obligated to pay it back. Our deficit has gone over the limit Congress set. Do you think we should or should not pay it off? If you think we are obligated to pay our debts then you are in favor of raising the debt ceiling. This does not mean more borrowing it means we can now pay off what we have already spent.

We all want reductions in government spending but not on the backs of the middle class and poor who are already stressed enough. The Republicans are holding the government (which is all of us) hostage by tying raising the debt ceiling to reducing money that goes to fund the social safety net. There are other more humane ways to do this that won’t eliminate jobs, won’t send the poor and elderly into the streets and will improve our economy.

We can cut the defense budget, end all three wars, and still be spending more on our military than any other nation in the world combined.