Humanity is the Human Being Event

Dec. 26, 2010 - PRLog -- In the last few years we have witnessed a number of developments regarding the human mind such as epigenetic and “mirror neuron”. These breakthroughs give us a new dimension to understanding it. Still the mind is one of the few subjects which science has made little progress. Science 2 pillars, cause-effect and experiment replication, do not fit very well in the study of the human mind. There are hundreds of explanations for the mind, but since science can’t reproduce it in the Lab, the discussion is always theoretical.

In this free event in NYC, “Humanity is the Human Being”, they will speak about the above findings and why the mind is one of the last frontiers of the human knowledge.  Participants will be encouraged to participate, asking questions, as well as sharing their own insight on the matter. Below is a sample of the material to be presented:

Many years ago Sun Microsystems, the same company that created Java, crafted the expression “The network is the computer”. What they meant is to point out the importance of the “net” (or multiple connection points) to a computer system. This is the same paradigm that sustains the explosive growth of the Internet, or the stellar success of Social Network sites such as Face book and YouTube. Their importance is given by the number of registered users. Even though this reality is crucial to us, in the sense that we are gregarious people, most the time it does not register in our conscious mind. Let’s leave behind of a moment that spending too much time in front of the computer is not good for our body or mind. Let’s focus on the social network phenomenon. What is telling us is that people feel an urge, conscious or not, to engage people and stay connected with the world. This yearn is part of our human nature and hasn’t changed throughout generations. What has changed is how we respond to this primordial and essential need.

Study of the "Roseto Effect" began with a chance conversation over a couple of beers in the late 1950s. A local physician happened to mention to the head of medicine at the University of Oklahoma, Stewart Wolf, that heart disease seemed much less prevalent in Roseto than in adjoining Bangor, occupied by non-Italians.

Medical researchers were drawn to Roseto by a bewildering statistic: in defiance of medical logic, Rosetans seemed nearly immune to one of the most common causes of death. They died of heart attacks at a rate only half of the rest of America. Doctors were mystified in that residents led what medical textbooks predicted would be short lives. In those days heart disease reached epidemic levels and still no one under the age of 65 was afflicted by it.

When first studied in 1966, Roseto's cardiac mortality traced a unique graph. Nationally, the rate rises with age. In Roseto, it dropped to near zero for men aged 55-64. For men over 65, the local death rate was half the national average. The study quickly went beyond death certificates, to poke, prod, and extensively interview the Rosetans. The men of the village smoked and drank wine freely. They spent their days in backbreaking, hazardous labor, working 200 feet down in nearby slate quarries. At home, the dinner tables each evening were laden with traditional Italian food, modified for local ingredients in ways that would drive a dietitian to despair.

The Mediterranean diet, with its use of olive oil rather than animal fat, has been touted lately for health benefits. But, poor immigrants couldn't afford to import cooking oil from their homeland and instead fry their sausages and brown their meatballs in lard. Also, they never exercise. Yet, the resulting hefty bodies contained unusually health hearts. Why?

Instead of helping to solve the puzzle, all the data simply ruled out any genetic or other physical sources of the Rosetan's resistance to heart disease. Statistics about Roseto were eye-catching: The crime rate and the applications for public assistance were zero. There was no suicides, alcoholism, and the death rate was 35% less than the United States as a whole. The death rate due heart disease of neighbor towns of Bangor and Nazareth was 3 times of Roseto’s rate.

Subsequent study showed that:
All of the houses contained three generations of the family. Rosetans took care of their own. Instead of putting the elderly "on the shelf," they were elevated "to the Supreme Court." Grand parents commanded great respect. They often cooked meals together. There were 22 civic organizations in a town of under 2,000 people. The scientists were led to conclude that the Roseto Effect was caused by something that could not be seen through the microscope, something beyond the usual focus of medical researchers and science.

It seemed that those groaning dinner tables offered nourishment for the human spirit as well as the body. In fact, all of the communal rituals, the evening stroll, the many social clubs, the church festivals that were occasions for the whole community to celebrate, contributed to the villagers' good health.

In "The Power of Clan," an updated report on studies by Stewart Wolf, a physician, and John Bruhn, a sociologist, cover a broad period of time from 1935 to 1984. They found that mutual respect and cooperation contribute to the health and welfare of a community and its inhabitants, and that self indulgence and lack of concern for others exert opposite influences.

Tracing the history of Roseto, the sociologists found that early immigrants were shunned by the English and Welsh who dominated this little corner of eastern Pennsylvania. According, the Rosetans turned inward and built their own culture of cooperation and as Wolf and Bruhn noted, "radiated a kind of joyous team spirit as they celebrated religious festivals and family landmarks."

In the 1980s, Rizzolatti and his colleagues had found that some neurons in an area of monkeys' premotor cortex called F5 fired when the monkeys did things like reach for or bite a peanut.

The researchers wanted to learn more about how these neurons responded to different objects and actions, so they used electrodes to record activity from individual F5 neurons while giving the monkeys different objects to handle.

They quickly noticed something surprising: When they picked up an object say, a peanut, to hand it to the monkey, some of the monkey's motor neurons would start to fire. Even more surprisingly, these were the same neurons that would also fire when the monkey itself grasped the peanut.

The researchers found that individual neurons would only respond to very specific actions. A mirror neuron that fired when, say, the monkey grasped a peanut would also fire when the experimenter grasped a peanut, while a neuron that fired when the monkey put a peanut in its mouth would also fire when the experimenter put a peanut in his own mouth.

The key is that mirror neurons respond only to an act with intention, with a predictable sequence of sense of purpose. If I simply wave my hand randomly, your mirror neurons will not fire. But if I carry out any act you can predict from experience, your neurons will respond, figuring out what I intend to do it before I do it. So when I lift my hand with a cup in it, you can predict at a sympathetic level that I intend to drink from the cup. Not only that, the mirror neurons in the premotor area of your frontal cortex will get you ready to drink as well. We see an act and we ready ourselves to imitate it. At the simplest level, that’s why we get thirsty when others drink, and why we yawn when others yawn. At the most complex level mirror neurons help us understand the nature of culture and how our shared behavior bind us together.

Tuesday, January 18 · 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Location        Primary Stages
307 West 38th Street, suite 1510
New York, NY

If you are in facebook you can RSVP below:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171578336206648