Audio File #3: Getting Entangled in Invisibilia

Cover for "Entanglement" by Daniel Horowitz

“Two things separated in space can be the same thing.” –Geoff Brumfiel, Entanglement

After the hit podcast Serial landed and enraptured a widening audience of audio fanatics, I think that a lot of people have been searching for new shows to fill the gap left behind by the conclusion of Serial season one. To this group—and to existing podcast aficionados—I present Invisibilia.

Invisibilia is the spiritual successor of Radiolab, and its production love-child along with This American Life. The two hosts, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, are founding producers of This American Life and Radiolab, respectively, and NPR science reporters besides. Latin for “all the invisible things,” Invisibilia promises a weekly exploration of the invisible forces that shape human behavior. So far, four shows in, this means Spiegel and Miller are creating a surprisingly spiritual discussion rooted in cutting edge neuroscience about the psychology and brain biology behind how humans feel and act.

The first three episodes covered the power and intrigue of our very own thoughts; how to control your fear (and what happens when you feel none); and the profound, very real, effects of people’s expectations of the blind. Each is truly, almost alarmingly, excellent. Today, I want to cover the latest episode: Entanglement.

Lulu and Alix begin by visiting a physics lab at the University of Maryland to witness the creation of quantum entanglement, the physical phenomenon of linking two objects together at a deep level. Once entangled, if one particle is altered—even at a great physical distance from its partner—the other responds accordingly. It’s messy, and brushes up against our notions of causality and the fundamental limit of the speed of light, but it is very real. And quantum entanglement is the lead in to the equally bizarre and fascinating world of entanglement among people, how we are intimately tied to the people around us in conscious and unconscious ways.

The first story of entanglement takes Alix and Lulu to a woman, Amanda, and her family. Amanda experiences a very rare form of extreme empathy, called mirror-touch synesthesia. Synesthesia is the general term for relatively rare but well-documented cases when people experience a mixing of traditionally separate senses, like seeing colors in numbers or tasting sounds. Basically, synesthesia boils down to crossed wires in the brain, which ultimately integrates all of our senses into conscious experience. In some people, that integration is messier.

For Amanda, the very experience of seeing someone experience something triggers the subjective sense of that act within herself. When she was young, she realized that seeing someone get hugged felt like a hug, at a very real, physical level. A woman scratching her arm felt like a scratch. People chewing food felt like they were stuffing food in her own mouth. Pain also transferred across space. Experiencing all of this, and an intense level of emotional empathy as well, left Amanda drained every day, and even unsure of her own identity as she took on the feelings and mannerisms of those around her.

The neurological explanation of Amanda’s difficult condition relies on mirror neurons. Observed directly only in monkeys so far, mirror neurons fire both when observing an action and when doing it. They are a cellular explanation for empathy. Presumably, mirror neurons, or something much like them, cause Amanda’s sensory cortex to light up just when watching a stranger feel or do something. I will leave the engrossing and melancholic exploration of the effects of this overcharged empathy on Amanda and her family to the hosts. Suffice to say, it is not easy being so intimately wrapped up in the world.

The second story features psychology researchers Elaine Hatfield and Dick Rapson of the University of Hawaii and their studies on ‘emotional contagion,’ the phenomenon of mimicking the physical and emotional states of those around you. Unconsciously, we match the posture or speaking patterns of people we interact with. Lulu goes on to explain that even imperceptible patterns, like blinking or breathing, will become synchronized.

Emotional mimicry is at play here as well. Linked to microexpressions—unconscious, rapid-fire flashes of emotion—this kind of emotional empathy influences the mood of everyone you interact with. Filled with audio of old Candid Camera episodes and the meshwork of Elaine and Dick marveling at the subject of their studies, the story comes alive with emotion and a sense of wonder. The researchers explain the consequences of this sponge-like absorption of our environment’s emotional energy, which include a limit on our individuality. We cannot truly be isolated, emotionally contained individuals if we react so viscerally to the emotions around us. Like smokers who try to quit but still hang around smokers, all of us are influenced in obvious and subtle ways by the people we surround ourselves with.

Or as Lulu explains: “It's like without quite being aware of it, we are all one organism, a heaving, swirling organism contracting the feelings and thoughts of the people around us.”

There is a bonus story at the end about the greatest entanglement—the one with our mothers—that I won’t spoil. In their exploration of Amanda’s extreme empathy, and our commonplace experience of it, Lulu and Alix manage to weave an emotional hour of awe, sadness, and laughter. Their story-telling pedigrees, and science journalism chops, combine to create the best science show I know of since Radiolab.

The show can stretch credulity. This is clearly not an accident. Alix and Lulu want to stretch your mind to the border of science fiction, and then push you back just over the edge toward reality. They deliberately construct ridiculous claims—about the blind seeing or the material reality of thoughts—and then carefully lead you to that exact conclusion through their narrative. They may test the boundaries of accuracy with hyperbole, but the sense of curiosity and wonder they instill seems worth it.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the refreshing power of having two quick, smart women discuss science with a clear sense of awe, respect, and desire to learn and share. Although Lulu and Alix are journalists, not scientists, I expect the show could really impact our culture where women are still underrepresented in science and face a lack of role models for scientific curiosity. Not scientists, no, but Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel have the scientific curiosity down, and we all benefit in Inivisibilia.

Keeping Spuds Safe--And Humans Too

Fortunately, potatoes are never quite as toxic as the alien carrots
in the Looney Tunes "Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers" episode

A team of Japanese scientists has published research that may help both protect potatoes from serious diseases and safeguard humans from poisonous spuds. The researchers, led by Dr. Kazui Saito, were able to identify a gene critical for making the toxic alkaloid chemicals that potatoes produce to protect themselves from pests. Although commonly-eaten varieties contain safe, low levels of these alkaloids, they are also more susceptible to certain major diseases. To combat infections, breeders want to crossbreed these safe spuds with disease-resistant—but poisonous—wild potato species without increasing the levels of toxic alkaloids in the potatoes we eat. Dr. Saito’s group has discovered a way to largely disable the production of these chemicals, opening up safer avenues to breed strong, resistant potatoes that do not make people sick.

Although normally safe, potatoes are serious contenders for the most toxic vegetable in the American diet. Potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants are all members of the nightshade family, which produces a group of chemicals called steroidal glycoalkaloids to defend against pests. In small amounts, these chemicals may cause an upset stomach, but extremely high doses can lead to dizziness, hallucinations, and even death.

Human domestication long ago selected for potatoes with low levels of these alkaloids. But domestication also produces crops that cannot defend themselves as well against diseases—in particular, our efforts to make potatoes safer, larger, and tastier have impaired the spud’s ability to protect itself against late blight disease, the most damaging potato infection. Late blight led to starvation in Ireland in the 1840s, and today accounts for billions of dollars in lost productivity worldwide.

Crop breeders routinely scout out hearty wild relatives of our foods, seeking to breed in traits like disease resistance. For potatoes, scientists must ensure that borrowing beneficial traits from wild varieties does not increase the levels of steroidal glycoalkaloids above a safe threshold. One way to limit this risk is to reduce the production of these alkaloids in potatoes before breeding programs even start.

So Dr. Saito’s group set out to understand how potatoes make these chemicals in order to control and limit their production. Steroidal glycoalkaloids primarily consist of a steroid backbone, which is made from cholesterol. As a result, the scientists searched for genes in the potato genome that resembled a human gene that helps synthesize cholesterol. Although humans, peas, and rice have only one copy of the gene, potatoes have two—SSR1 and SSR2.

Having two similar genes is often a sign that the two copies have evolved to specialize. While most plants use a single gene to make cholesterol and other important chemicals like hormones, Dr. Saito and his colleagues reasoned that potatoes might have divided those two tasks between the two SSR genes.

To test this, they put the genes into yeast that made the chemical precursors of either cholesterol or plant hormones and measured what chemicals each SSR gene produced. They found that while SSR1 efficiently produced plant hormones, SSR2 excelled at making cholesterol. This specialization means that disabling SSR2 would shut down cholesterol and steroidal glycoalkaloid production without affecting SSR1’s synthesis of important hormones.

Scientists can add snippets of a plant’s own gene to activate a natural viral defense mechanism—a kind of plant immune system—and impair the native gene’s function. When the Japanese researchers did this with SSR2, alkaloid levels plummeted to a tenth their normal level, while the plants themselves grew just fine, a sign that hormones still functioned properly.

Another technology, called genome editing, can produce permanent errors in a specific gene, turning it off completely. The researchers added an editing protein that disrupted SSR2 and found that the alkaloid levels again dropped to a fraction of their normal amount. The editing protein can be removed in the next generation. This leaves only the precise changes dialed in by the scientists and 100 percent potato DNA, unlike most crop genetic modifications that add DNA from other species.  

The ability to produce specific new changes with the potato’s own DNA may reduce widespread concerns about genetically modified crops, which, although shown to be safe, are rejected by a large number of consumers.  This would be good news for scientists looking for new tools to improve potatoes and other foods.  Late blight and other diseases are ongoing scourges and the expanded toolbox for safely combating them provided by Dr. Saito’s group may help keep the world’s fourth-largest crop on a level playing field with these infections while keeping spuds safe.

[This news story served as part of my application to the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship]

A Divided St. Louis that Must Be Repaired

St. Louis is a divided region. In 1876, the City of St. Louis voted to separate from St. Louis County, defining a surprisingly small city center, barely a quarter the area of Chicago, and making it one of the few major independent cities in the United States. During the 1900s, the City was divided into a poor, largely black North City and a more affluent South City. St. Louis was split again—not geographically but socially—in August when Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, a suburb in St. Louis County. What happened in Ferguson this summer was likely the inevitable result of the divisions with which St. Louis has never grappled. What is not inevitable is that St. Louis will seize this opportunity to heal these fractures. To do so, the region must recognize how these divisions were deliberately constructed, and pursue the intentional dismantling of their consequences.

A racially-divided St. Louis was created throughout the twentieth century. The first half of the century was a story of growth and progress. In 1904, St. Louis hosted the first Olympics on American soil, alongside a World’s Fair. By 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the country. Accompanying this rise, the city’s existing segregation into black and white was formalized.  Redlining—the then-legal process of restricting housing by race—defined select neighborhoods where blacks were allowed to rent or buy. Existing black neighborhoods were considered a loss; white neighborhoods were protected from change. Even after redlining was officially prohibited, realtors and municipal decision-makers worked to maintain the same outcome: racially-restricted housing.

Eventually, a large portion of North City was set aside for black residents, who were barred from most other areas by formal and informal housing covenants, including the increasingly affluent County suburbs. As the City’s population declined sharply after World War II, spurred by rampant white flight, the urban core was hollowed out. The same pattern hit many cities, especially other Midwestern industrial centers like Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago. Housing restrictions kept black citizens from fleeing the blight, further concentrating poverty within the majority-black North City.

Even well-meaning efforts reinforced segregation and poverty. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects, built in the 1950s, were hailed as a progressive solution to the problems of slums and urban decay, and the city leveled several blocks in North City to build the segregated high-rise buildings. They quickly fell into disrepair and attracted crime, deteriorating without financial support from the City to ensure upkeep. Barely two decades after construction, having cost hundreds of millions in today’s dollars, the failed projects were demolished. The neighborhoods cleared to build Pruitt-Igoe never recovered. Those in power did not control changing economies or demographic trends, but they did ensure that the worst effects were felt by an increasingly marginalized black population. Today, the former site of Pruitt-Igoe is surrounded by blocks with only a few houses on each street. North city is devastated: it was designed to fail, and it did.  The echoes of this mid-1900s segregationist policy were felt in Ferguson this past summer.

When the City voted to separate from the County in 1876, City residents were worried about the poorer, sparser County siphoning off tax revenue. As suburbanization boosted the County’s population and wealth, this separation increasingly hurt the City’s financial and social position. And divisions continued: dozens of cities incorporated within St. Louis County during the twentieth century, a process of balkanization that created the 91 distinct municipalities that exist today. One ‘city’ has a population of 12. This creates a complicated map of overlapping taxes, school districts, and police.

The very real effects of these confusing divisions were seen this past August. A Ferguson (population: 21,000, 67% black, North County) police officer who lived in Crestwood (population: 12,000, 94% white, South County) shot Michael Brown. The investigation was handed over to County Police, an overarching force that has authority over, but does not patrol, Ferguson. The County Prosecutor’s office in Clayton (population: 16,000, 78% white, West County) oversaw the grand jury proceedings. Calls for everything from body cameras on police to altered hiring practices have to contend with the political realities of this municipal patchwork.

After housing restrictions were lifted, black flight followed older waves of white flight, predominantly into North County, to escape the decay of North City. Cities like Ferguson and Florissant, northwest of the city limits, shifted from largely white suburbs to racially-mixed, but poorly-integrated, communities. City councils and police departments, staffed largely by officers from other towns, did not shift accordingly. This is the context in which Ferguson became a household name.  In Ferguson, newer black residents concentrated in middling apartment complexes in one corner of the city. Police calls and patrols became more common in the area. Tensions increased between police and the apartment residents. Darren Wilson and Michael Brown interacted for all of ninety seconds before Brown was dead and Wilson went into hiding, but the forces that brought them together on August 9^th were slowly churning for decades.

Since that day, the world has watched waves of unrest and violence. Riot gear, arson, and tear gas made headlines on the warm nights of August and again following the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson in November. News networks broadcasted burning cop cars side-by-side with President Obama’s appeals for calm. Yet despite the endless visuals of violence and the portrait of a community seeming to self-destruct on national television, much has happened in St. Louis out of sight of the cameras that shows a first step toward progress.

In Ferguson, volunteers came out each morning to clean up the debris from protests the night before. With the start of the school year delayed, donations of school supplies flooded in to churches and community centers, and libraries offered free lessons for children. Peace vigils sprang up in neighborhoods around the region. Protests marched through downtown St. Louis at the foot of the iconic Arch to call for peace and change. Universities assembled panels of experts in law, policing, and civil rights to provide context and information. Antonio French, a North City alderman, founded #HealSTL, a social media volunteer organization, and opened a storefront in Ferguson to coordinate long-term efforts. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon formed the independent Ferguson Commission—whose members range from young black activists to police officers to clergy—which is charged with finding a path to a stronger region through communication and action.

When the grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, protests marched along South Grand, a strip of shops and ethnic restaurants at the center of South City, far from Ferguson, but a secondary epicenter of protests. Around a dozen windows were shattered and businesses rushed to board up damaged and undamaged storefronts alike in anticipation of more protests. Right away, the neighborhood associations put out a call for materials, artists, and volunteers to decorate the plywood. Hundreds of people came out all day and night to paint images and words of support, turning a symbol of a broken community into uplifting messages of healing and love. Rather than exist for weeks as a boarded up ghost town, South Grand was transformed into an impromptu art walk. Few such events grabbed national attention, but they have galvanized St. Louis communities and brought a shaken populace together in the wake of tragedy. They seemed to begin the slow—painfully slow—process of healing.

No one can know if St. Louis will face the aftermath of the events in Ferguson with the resolve to address the long-standing divides that culminated in Brown’s death. Protests last weeks or months. Progress takes years and decades. The Ferguson Commission is encouraging dialogue and new ideas while the conversations St. Louisans have with each other every day open new channels of communication over old separations. This fractured and segregated city took decades of concerted effort and troubling economic forces to create.  St. Louis now requires the deliberate interventions of many to repair itself and move toward a community that is brought together as purposefully as it has been divided.

[This essay served as part of my application to the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship]