Your insides are talking – are you listening?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physiology, internal organs

A book like Organ Speak: What it Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies, by Giulia Enders, can go in many directions. The direction Dr. Enders takes is to introduce five organ systems. In common culture, asked to name our bodily organs, we may list the heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, and eyes; maybe some would add spleen, pancreas, liver, large and small intestines, and at that point run out of ideas. Here we find a short but crucial list, in order, the Lung, Immune system, Skin, Muscles, and the Brain (including the extended nervous system).

These are wise and clever choices. Few people realize that besides the lungs, the other four permeate or encompass our entire body from tip to toe. Maybe in the future a sequel will include the Skeleton and the Vascular system including Heart; they also fill the body without filling it up.

Jumping to the middle of the book, the skin probably has more unique functions than any of the others. It has perhaps a dozen different sensory "instruments" that sample the outside world in an up-close-and-personal way. At the same time, the skin is our primary organ of defense, a barrier and barricade against injuries, attacks by micro- (and macro-) organisms, and chemical threats such as the salt in seawater when we take an ocean swim. (I prompted Gemini for this illustration, using a line from the parody song "Skin" by Allan Sherman.)

A side note, something I've considered: The skin seems to be an osmotic membrane. Osmosis causes water to move through a membrane to the side with more salt. Have you ever noticed how soon after beginning to swim in fresh water you feel the need to pee? It's why public swimming pools are filled with chlorine and other chemicals! Yet when you swim in the ocean, you rarely need to pee, but instead get quite thirsty? Ocean water is saltier than your bodily fluids, and water slowly exits your body into the seawater.

The second chapter has the best explanation of the components of the immune system that I've seen. Some cells are of ancient lineage and function much as they did to protect trilobites from Cambrian organisms. Others have been added over the eons. The system is quite complex, and when it is kept in good balance, it has much to do with why we and certain other mammals can live 50, or 100, or more years (I understand that the secret behind certain tortoises and sharks living 200 years and more is their very slow metabolism. I suspect that, opposite to the principle that dogs age seven times as fast as humans, a human ages four or five times as fast as a Greenland Shark).

Our brain, and its development over time from the proto-brains of tiny Precambrian worms all through the vertebrate line to primates and then humans, is a layered structure with many parts. I think of them as sub-organs. This structure strongly hints at the true nature of our nervous system: many parts working together to sense the world, operate the body, generate plans, communicate, and support our sense of self and personal wholeness.

A portion of the chapter discusses sleep, its various stages, what promotes going to sleep and passing through these stages, and what is happening when we dream. I found this statement rather stunning: 

"When we're dreaming, areas of the brain can communicate with each other without reason or sensory impressions getting in the way."

That seems to explain the odd or inane quality of many dreams. I feel like I dream all night, sometimes beginning before I am fully asleep. There is often a sense of drive or purpose, but all too often the scene keeps switching, so there's never a sense of completion. On the other hand, my wife almost never remembers dreaming, but when she does remember, it is usually unpleasant or just puzzling.

In the Brain chapter the author discusses AI a little, in the context of Moravec's Paradox, which is that many things we do with little thought are extremely difficult for computer machinery, but things that computers excel at are very hard for us. This statement (by the author or by Moravec's group, I cannot tell) sums it up:

"If intelligence is defined by the number of thought processes (or calculation steps) necessary to arrive at a result, then even tying shoelaces is vastly superior to winning a chess world championship."

In a career in software development and design, I lived by the motto, "Brains excel at detecting similarities; computers excel at detecting differences." I built a lucrative career on making machine expertise available to humans, while reserving to the humans the tasks the machine couldn't do. We would do well to keep this principle in mind when devising AI tools. We are at most one percent along the way to producing AGI, and getting to true ASI will require another factor of 100. We can barely afford the tools we're now using. I think we're safe from a robot dystopia for a long time to come.

I should mention that the book was very ably translated from German by Jamie Bulloch, and illustrated by the author's sister Jill Enders, who was also an idea-collaborator. The sisters work well together.