10 18 2024
Upon reading
Participant diversity is necessary to advance brain aging research Gagan S. Wig , 1,2,3,4,* ,@ Sarah Klausner,1 Micaela Y. Chan,1 Cameron Sullins,1 Anirudh Rayanki,2 and Maya Seale2
Where I learned that there was an association between the zip code of residence and how the brain evolves with age.
And
David Abrams “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a more than human world”
Which argues that before writing was invented, places were the encyclopedia of the mind.
What came to mind was some of the key toilets in my life.
A fixture that consists usually of a water-flushed bowl and seat and is used for defecation and urination
The act or process of dressing and grooming oneself (body and mind)
The word toilet comes from the French word toilette, which means “dressing room”. Toilette comes from the word toile, which means “cloth”. The word entered the English language in the 17th century
Or an undressing room of the mind?
The one that comes to mind immediately is the ‘blue toilet’ at No 17 Rue Emile Dunois where I lived often from 1954 to now.
When my brother Alan and I were kids, learning to use the toilet, our father had us paint on the back of Christmas cards drawings and paintings to put on the wall of the toilet. The paintings revealed many childhood anxieties (like not drawing pictures of naked women like our father did)
Recently I moved the pictures to the downstairs toilet, and the memories moved with them.
When our family lived in Meyreuil, I would take the family to strange music concerts in Marseille.
The term ‘toilet music’ arose.
Daddy daddy take us to the toilet not to Marseille, it’s cheaper.
In late middle age I developed urinary incontinence. I arrived late for a meeting with the University president, and in a hurry peed on the wall outside his building behind the bushes.
A student reported me to the campus police, and they came to the Presidents office to warn me about public indecency.
But as a teenager our father would have us pee on the chestnut tree at the gate of no 17.
The pause to pee made us change states of mind to enter our home where there were often guests. As we peed we discussed the people we were about to meet.
Peeing is important, but the places you frequently pee become memory palaces.
My aunt Thyra was going to take a bath and bathe me as a 4 year old; but she insisted on taking a shower first so we wouldn’t swim in our pee.
I just had lunch with Gagan Wig and discussed his zip code research, he brought out how mechanisms emerge in the complex network of the human brain from interactions with the frequent environment, around the human brain, just as David Abram elaborates.
In cultures that were primarily oral, places had meaningful meaning. Part of our ecological disaster causing is one impact of the invention of the alphabet.
The toilets in the building I now work in at UTDallas are un-memorable. Let’s use toilets as art galleries to stimulate creativity. With bookshelves for us to read and think as we wee for many minutes a day.
I remember in boarding school I learned the term “cottaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottaging
That were glory holes of the mind (cyber-cottages?)
Let’s create social space public “cyber- restrooms” (as toilets are euphemistically known in the US)
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/west/san-francisco-public-restroom-photos
a new San Francisco public bathroom opened in 2024 in San Francisco.
The event is described as a “blowout celebration” for the facility, will feature a Toilet Tree ceremony and an ornament crafts table. The event will also include activities such as yoga, face painting, live music and a “toilet bowl toss.”
Yes.
David Abram: https://www.davidabram.org/ David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology.
Gagan Wig: https://www.wigneurolab.org/ Our brain and cognitive abilities change over time. These changes are clear and rapid during childhood, but the brain continues to get sculpted throughout adulthood. Age-related brain changes are often beneficial, but they can also have detrimental impacts on cognitive vitality. We are a Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory whose research is focused on examining how and why the brain ages. As a part of this goal, we aim to understand why some individuals can remain cognitively resilient as they grow older, while others are more vulnerable to decline. Our lab’s research utilizes non-invasive brain imaging techniques to study brain anatomy and function in healthy and unhealthy individuals across the lifespan.
EMERGENCE
Wig et al say
The brain functions as a network and our research is focused on defining and understanding the large-scale organization of brain networks using neuroimaging. This work is done primarily in human participants, but we have also recently expanded our research to include non-human rodents and primates. We use network analysis methods to explore the complex relationships that exist between brain areas (large groups of connected neurons that are functionally related). Our goal is to uncover how brain network organization gives rise to cognition (e.g., long-term memory, attention, language), how it changes over years and decades, and how it is disrupted by diseases.
Cortical organization should constrain the study of how the brain performs behavior and cognition. A fundamental concept in cortical organization is that of arealization: that the cortex is parceled into discrete areas. In part one of this report, we review how non-human animal studies have illuminated principles of cortical arealization by revealing: (1) what defines a cortical area, (2) how cortical areas are formed, (3) how cortical areas interact with one another, and (4) what “computations” or “functions” areas perform. In part two, we discuss how these principles apply to neuroimaging research. In doing so, we highlight several examples where the commonly accepted interpretation of neuroimaging observations requires assumptions that violate the principles of arealization, including nonstationary areas that move on short time scales, large-scale gradients as organizing features, and cortical areas with singular functionality that perfectly map psychological constructs. Our belief is that principles of neurobiology should strongly guide the nature of computational explanations.
SO
Learn about where un-human animals choose to pee.
Design and be careful about where you choose to pee. Sitting down to pee (think) is better for the brain than standing up; men need to learn from women.