Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.
The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials. So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:
You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back." They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot. Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.
Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating." This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques. So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."
Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."
The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before. Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children. Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens. Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.
So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed. There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.
I..e., it's a fraud.
If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing. We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.
But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion. And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.
Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception. A pity, really. At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.
If it hadn't been for a sharp-eyed loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I might well have missed the fact that the Rapture is going to happen next Tuesday. Which would have sucked. I hate it when the world ends and I only find out afterward.
Because, of course, the Day of Doom is very likely to come and go without fanfare, which is what's happened the previous 5,382,913 times they've predicted the Rapture or Armageddon or the Rise of the Antichrist or the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers, or various other cheerful scenarios dreamed up for our edification by the God of Love. Each time, I pop my popcorn, open a bottle of beer, get out my lawn chair...
It's a pity, honestly. I live in rural upstate New York, where if you are waiting for something exciting to happen, you're going to have a long wait. Yesterday the news around here was dominated by the fact that the main highway through this area is going to be closed for a time for repaving, requiring a detour that will mean we are no longer in the Middle of Nowhere, we're in the Middle of Nowhere + two or three extra miles. So I can say with some confidence that for most upstaters, if the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns showed up, we'd be thrilled to have something to alleviate the boredom.
Which brings up a question I've always wondered about, ever since I was a kid and first stumbled upon the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation; why would the Beast have three more crowns than he has heads? To me, the crown-to-head ratio is most logically one-to-one. Does he trade out crowns from day to day, and as he's getting ready for another busy day of terrorizing the populace, he stands there staring into his closet trying to pick out which ones he's going to wear? Or does he have two crowns on three of his heads, and only one on the rest? That's the way I recall picturing it, and it bothered the absolute hell out of me, because it seemed arbitrary and asymmetrical, and as a kid I was just the slightest bit tightly wound. It was only later that I realized that I wasn't supposed to like the Beast, and if something about him grated on my nerves, that was probably all part of the Infernal Plan.
But I digress.
Anyhow, this time around, the Rapture has been predicted by a self-styled YouTube prophet who goes by the handle Generation2423. He certainly seems sincere enough, but then, they all do, don't they? Rapture prediction has been a game among that particular slice of the devout for centuries. Generation2423, though, isn't generating the buzz that (for example) Harold Camping did, back in 2011. Camping publicized the incipient End of the World so much he got a ton of people to do stuff like sell all their worldly goods and quit their jobs. Then -- as it always does -- the day came and went, and everyone just went on loping about the place un-Raptured, doing their thing. Undaunted, he rescheduled the Rapture for six months later, and that day too passed without any calamities. Camping finally died two years afterward, disappointed to the last that he never got to enjoy seeing the Star Wormwood fall upon the rivers and lakes, and cause everyone who drinketh of the water to die in horrible agony.
Oh, what fun that would have been for him.
What's wryly amusing about all this is that the evangelicals who shriek the most loudly about the End Times are the same ones who claim to follow a man who is supposed to "come like a thief in the night" and who said "no one knoweth the day or the hour." (Matthew 24:42-44) The result is that they have about the same stealthiness level as these guys:
On the other hand, I have to admit that this time around, the lead-up to the big day has been a lot more subdued than usual. Like I said, I damn near missed it. Once alerted to what's coming, though, I did find a good bit about it online, especially on Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, and I did see a few people who found Generation2423's prediction genuinely scary. One poor woman on TikTok said she was so terrified she felt nauseated, and was devastated she'd never get to see her kids grow up. And I have to admit I felt a little sorry for her.
On the other hand, what always baffles me is the reaction of people like this after the prediction fails to pan out. Because in a sane world, you'd think the True Believers would go, "Oh, what goobers we were to fall for such a ridiculous claim! I shall learn some critical thinking skills right now!" But that never happens. Regular readers might recall that earlier this year, I wrote about the classic study done by psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, who back in 1954 infiltrated a doomsday cult. When the predicted Day of Reckoning came, the cult members assembled in the home of the leader, praying like mad for fortitude to face the upcoming cataclysm. At around 11:30 PM, the leader -- presumably concerned by the fact that all was quiet -- went into a back room, alone, to pray. Then he came out just before midnight to announce the amazing news: God had told him he was rewarding their faithfulness and prayers by postponing the end of the world!
And there was much rejoicing. Contrary to what you might expect, the result was that the cult members' belief became more fervent, because after all, how else could you explain the fact that their prayers had been granted? Further illustrating the truth of the quote from Jonathan Swift: "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into."
In any case, if you have plans for next Wednesday, I wouldn't worry about it. Myself, I don't have any plans, but that's because I never do. Assuming I'm still here Wednesday morning, I'm thinking I might head on down to Route 96 and see how the repaving is going. That's about all the excitement I can handle.
As a linguist, one of the things you have to get used to is that languages change.
The denial of this basic fact is at the heart of the argument between prescriptivists (people who think there are hard-and-fast rules regarding "proper" or "correct" speech and writing) and descriptivists (people who believe that a linguist's job is not to codify language for the purpose of determining what's correct, but simply to describe it and monitor how it changes). I tend to be strongly descriptivist -- after all, my M.A. is in historical linguistics, and if the vocabulary and syntactic rules of languages didn't evolve, I'd be out of a job. On the other hand, there's a line (no, I don't know where exactly it is), because if there were no grammatical and pronunciation rules whatsoever, it'd make communication pretty difficult.
So I understand why we teach prescriptively. But it behooves us all to realize that the language is gonna change anyhow, whether we want it to or not, and fighting like hell against it is the very definition of an exercise in futility.
One of the places things change the fastest is in slang. When I taught high school, I used to run into new slang expressions very nearly on a daily basis. Some of them have interesting origins. For example, the slang use of the word ship -- meaning, to watch or read a piece of fiction and hope that two characters fall in love -- comes from the characterization of fans who want that outcome for the characters as "relationshippers." This got shortened to "shippers," and finally converted into a verb -- e.g., "I ship Mulder and Scully." (And in fact, the word did come from fans of the iconic television show The X Files.)
The capacity for sinking yourself into the lives of a celebrity or a fictional character led to another coinage, this one from none other than a song by Eminem. It's the word stan -- a portmanteau word made up by combining stalker and fan. Initially, it had a completely negative connotation, implying the person was deranged, perhaps dangerous. But over time it's moderated, and like ship has become a verb, meaning "to behave like a fanboy/fangirl." The recent sweet queer romcom Red, White, and Royal Blue led to a lot of people stanning Alex and Prince Henry -- and I have to admit I felt a little of that myself.
Then there's yeet, which dates to 1998, and means "to throw something." The origin of this word is uncertain, but may be imitative, representing the noise you make when you pitch something heavy. I posted on social media last week something about this word -- "Linguistics question of the day: is the past tense of yeetyote? Because it should be." This generated a rather hilarious discussion over whether it should be yote, yot, yaught, yet, or yut, and one person who patiently explained to all of us that because yeet is a modern coinage, we shouldn't expect it to follow any of the patterns from Middle English strong verbs, so it should be yeeted.
Illustrating another general principle, which is that no matter how obvious you try to make humor, some people are going to take you seriously.
Even accents change, and it's new research in this field that brought the topic to my mind today. A recent study at the University of Georgia found that the traditional Southern drawl -- for example, pronouncing prize as /praz/ and not as the more standard American English /praiz/, and face as /fɤis/ and not as /feis/ -- is fast disappearing. The last generation of Southerners whose pronunciations are characteristic of the old drawl are Baby Boomers. (There are exceptions, mainly in rural areas, but their numbers are dwindling quickly.) The homogenizing effects of movement from one region to another, and hearing the more common accents of the Pacific Coast and Midwest on television, have gradually shifted the way people speak. (And another factor has a darker subtext, one that as a native Southerner I'm really sensitive to; people using a fake Southern accent to code someone being stupid, bigoted, or backwards. These ugly perceptions are why a lot of people who move north strive to lose their Southern-ness.)
The South is not the only area in the United States experiencing this, of course. "The demographics of the South have changed a lot with people moving into the area, especially post World War II," said study co-author Jon Forrest, of the University of Georgia department of linguistics. "We are seeing similar shifts across many regions, and we might find people in California, Atlanta, Boston and Detroit that have similar speech characteristics."
While I understand the reasons behind all this, and I know it's inevitable, I can't help but find it a little sad that regions are losing part of what makes them unique. Our mobility and the role that television and movies have in culture are blending a lot of the distinctness out of us.
So while we'll continue seeing new coinages like ship and stan and yeet, we'll see other features of our language fade and eventually disappear. It's the way of things. Take, for example, this recounting of an argument from printer and writer William Caxton in 1490, when Middle English was inexorably evolving into Modern English, leading to the older generation having some difficulties being understood even in matters as simple as what the plural of egg was:
In my dayes happened that certayn marchau[n]tes were in a ship in Tamyse [the Thames] for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande [in Holland] and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte Forlond [in Kent]. and wente to lande for to refreshe them[.] And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows [house] and axed [asked] for mete [food], and specyally he axyed after egges[.] And the good wyf answerde, that she coude speke no Frenshe. And the marchau[n]t was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren, then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certainly it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite [&] chau[n]ge of langage.
Well, thanks to my friend, the brilliant writer Gil Miller, I now have another reason to huddle under my blankie for the rest of the day.
We've dealt here before with a great many cosmic phenomena that you would seriously not want to get too close to. Some of these sound like Geordi-Laforgian technobabble from Star Trek, but I promise all of them are quite real:
From this, you might come to the conclusion that I have a morbid fascination with astronomical phenomena that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you. This is not entirely incorrect; I would only modify it insofar as to add that I am also morbidly fascinated with geological phenomena (earthquakes, volcanoes, pyroclastic flows, lahars) and meteorological phenomena (hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, microbursts) that are big and scary and dangerous and can kill you.
Call it a failing.
In any case, thanks to Gil's eagle-eyed facility for spotting cool recent research in science, I now have a new astronomical one to add to the list -- a luminous fast cooler. This one provides the added frisson of being (as yet) unexplained -- although as you'll see, there's a possible explanation for it that makes it even scarier.
The research that uncovered the phenomenon was done by a team led by Matt Nicholl, astrophysicist at Queen's University Belfast, using data from ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (speaking of scary phenomena) telescope network in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa. The event they discovered was (fortunately) nowhere near our own neighborhood; it was spotted in a galaxy two billion light years away.
What happened is that a completely ordinary, Sun-like star suddenly flared up by a factor of a hundred billion. The first thought, of course, was supernova -- but this explosion's profile was completely different than that of a supernova, and stars the size of the Sun aren't supposed to go supernova anyhow. Then, as if to add to the mystery, it cooled just as fast, fading by two orders of magnitude in only two weeks. A month later, it was only at one percent of its peak brightness shortly after detonating (still, of course, considerably brighter than it had been).
The first question, of course, is "if it wasn't a supernova, what was it?" And the answer thus far is "we're not sure." So the researchers started trying to find other examples of the phenomenon, and uncovered two previously unrecognized events that matched the recent explosion's profile, one in 2009 and one in 2020.
But that still doesn't tell us how a perfectly ordinary star can suddenly go boom. Nicholl says that the team has come up with only one possible hypothesis -- and it's a doozie.
"The most plausible explanation seems to be a black hole colliding with a star," Nicholl said.
Well, that's just all kinds of comforting.
Artist's conception of a black hole devouring a star [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]
So it's all very well to say cheerily, "Hey, at least the Sun's not gonna go supernova, and we don't have any Wolf-Rayet stars nearby, and the nearest gamma-ray burster isn't pointed in our direction, and false vacuum collapse is really unlikely! We're sitting here happily orbiting a highly stable star still in the prime of life, in a quiet corner of the galaxy! What could go wrong?"
Apparently, what could go wrong is that a black hole could come swooping in out of nowhere and make the Sun explode.
Now, mind you, there are no black holes near us. That we know of. And chances are, we would, because even though they're black (thus the name), their influence on the matter around them is considerable. The great likelihood is if there were a black hole headed for a crash with the Sun, you'd know about it plenty in advance.
Not that there's anything you could do about it, other than the time-honored maneuver of sticking your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.
So thanks to Gil for making me feel even tinier and more fragile than I already did, which led me to share this delightful discovery with you.
As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in genealogy, linguistics, and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines all three, it's a source of great joy to me.
This was my reaction to a study in Nature on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns. Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.
Quite a collaborative effort.
It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement. First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as forty thousand years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day. Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around eight thousand years ago. Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.
Anyone with European ancestry has all three. Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.
Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous. We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is. Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible. That's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father). This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy. It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups -- cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.
So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children. Take that, neo-Nazis.
Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899 [Image is in the Public Domain]
In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians. And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!
The authors write:
[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today. Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.
The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:
The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown. Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE. Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language. Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s. It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing. There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north... Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.
Which I think is pretty damn cool. The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back forty thousand years, is nothing short of stunning.
Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying. According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English. No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.
On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry. Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm. Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.
We've had both our dogs DNA tested -- purely for our own entertainment, not because we have any concern about "pure breeding" -- and both of them gave us results that were quite a shock.
First, there's Guinness, whom the rescue agency told us was a black lab/akita mix. You can see why:
Turns out he is neither -- he's American Staffordshire terrier, husky, chow, and Dalmatian.
Then there's Rosie, who we thought sure would turn out to be fox terrier/beagle:
Once again, not even close. She came out to be a mix of about ten different breeds in which Australian cattle dog predominates. Not a trace of hound, which is surprising not only because of her facial features, but her temperament. We've had hounds several times before, and they are sweet and loving... and stubborn, headstrong, and selectively deaf, all of which describe Rosie perfectly.
I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a fifty-dollar mail-order dog DNA test to be all that reliable, mind you. In Guinness's case, though, there are features that do make sense -- the ebullient disposition and square face of the AmStaff, and the curly tail and thick, silky undercoat of his husky/chow ancestry. Whatever its accuracy, though, it's fascinating that any signal of ancestry at all shows up in a simple saliva test.
Especially given that just about every dog breed in existence traces back to wild dog populations in only a few thousand years. That's an extremely short time to have any evolutionary divergence take place. But genetic testing has become sophisticated enough that we can now retrace the steps in dog evolution -- creating a family tree of dog relationships encompassing 321 different dog breeds (including several sorts of wild dogs).
A team of geneticists led by Jeff Kidd of the University of Michigan, Jennifer R. S. Meadows of Uppsala University, and Elaine A. Ostrander of the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute did a detailed study of two thousand different DNA samples containing over forty-eight million analyzable sequences. They identified three million SNPs -- single nucleotide polymorphisms, or "snips" -- that were characteristic of certain breeds.
"We did an analysis to see how similar the dogs were to each other," Kidd said. "It ended up that we could divide them into around twenty-five major groups that pretty much match up with what people would have expected based on breed origin, the dogs' type, size and coloration."
Interestingly, wild dogs and "village dogs" -- dogs that are somewhere between domesticated and feral, something you find in a lot of towns in developing countries -- have significantly more genetic diversity than domestic breeds do. This, of course, contributes to their vigor (and, conversely, is why many "pure" dog breeds are susceptible to particular health problems). It's also why it's so easy to identify behavioral characteristics of particular breeds, like the cheerfulness of golden retrievers, the intelligence and independent nature of huskies, and the nervousness of chihuahuas.
And the fact that if you want to partake in an exercise in frustration, try to housebreak a cocker spaniel.
If you take the time to read the original paper -- highly recommended, because it's amazingly cool -- you'll get to see the final "family tree" of dog breeds and see who's related to whom.
Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because Guinness wants to go outside and play. I wonder what gene controls the trait of Wanting To Retrieve Tennis Balls For Hours. Because whatever it is, I think Guinness has like fifty copies of it.
The main character of Haruki Murakami's brilliant and terrifying short story "Sleep" is a perfectly normal middle-class woman living in Tokyo. Her husband is a dentist, and they've got a lively, cheerful five-year-old son. Everything about her life is so ordinary that it's hard even to describe.
Then, in one instant, all that changes.
One night, she awakens -- or thinks she has -- to a terrifying vision that even afterward, she's not certain was real or a hallucination during sleep paralysis. A dark shape is huddled by the foot of her bed, and unfolds itself to reveal the figure of an elderly man, dressed in black, staring at her with an undisguised malevolence. She attempts to scream, and can't. After a moment, she forces herself to close her eyes, and when she opens them, the man is gone. She's drenched with sweat, so she gets up, showers, pours herself a brandy, and waits for morning.
But after that moment, she is completely unable to go to sleep. Ever.
The remainder of the story could be a teaching text in a fiction writing course lesson about how to create a believable Unreliable Narrator. She returns to her ordinary life, but everything starts seeming... off. Some senses are amplified, others dulled into nonexistence. Everyday objects appear surreal, as if they've changed subtly, but she can't quite tell how. One evening, she watches her husband as he's sleeping, and realizes that his face suddenly looks ugly to her. She takes to going out driving at night (once her husband and son are asleep) and meets people who may or may not be real. Her progressive slide into insanity reaches its apogee in the wee hours of one night, after seventeen days with no sleep, when she drives farther than she has ever driven, and ends up in an empty parking lot overlooking the ocean. Dark figures raise themselves on either side of her little car, grab it by the handles, and begin to rock it back and forth, harder and harder. She's thrown around by the motion, slamming against the door and steering wheel, and her last panicked thought is, "It's going to flip over, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."
An apt, if disturbing, summation of what is happening to her mind.
Sleep is an absolutely critical part of human health, but even after decades of research, it is unclear why. Just about every animal studied sleeps, and many of them seem to dream -- or at least undergo REM sleep -- the same as we do. (I know my dogs do; both of them bark and twitch in their sleep, and our sweet, gentle little dog Rosie sometimes growls as if she was the biggest meanest Rottweiler on the planet.)
Now, a team at the Binzhou Medical University's Shandong Technology Innovation Center has found one reason why sleep is so critical. Sleep-deprived mice stop producing a protein called pleiotrophin, which apparently has a protective effect on the cells of the hippocampus. Reduced pleiotrophin levels lead to cell death -- impairing both memory and spatial awareness. Pleiotrophin decline has also been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
What's unclear, though, is what direction the causation points. Does the decline in pleiotrophin from sleeplessness cause the neurodegeneration, or does the neurodegeneration lead to insomnia and a drop in pleiotrophin levels? The current research suggests the former, as the mice in the study had been genetically engineered to experience sleep disturbances, and the pleiotrophin loss seems to have followed as a consequence of the sleep deprivation. Then, the question is, if pleiotrophin decline does trigger neurodegeneration, could the damage from Alzheimer's be prevented by increasing the production of the protein?
Uncertain at this point, but it's intriguing to find one piece of a puzzle that has intrigued us for centuries. It seems fitting to end this musing on the power of sleep with the famous quote from Macbeth:
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
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